Locating Strategies in Selenium WebDriver

Introduction 
In Selenium WebDriver, locators are used to identify elements on a webpage. The findElement() to find a single element and findElements() to find multiple elements. There are multiple ways to uniquely identify a web element within the web page such as ID, CSS Selector, XPATH, Name, Class Name, Tag Name, Link Text, And Partial Link Text.

FindElement(): method returns a single element or throws an exception if none is found. 

Syntax 

WebElement elementName = driver.findElement(By.LocatorStrategy("ValueOfLocators"));

Below are some examples of Locator Strategy

1. Id: Finds elements with an Id attribute that includes the specified value.

WebElement elementId = driver.findElement(By.id("header_block")); 

2. CSS Selector: Locates elements matching a CSS selector.

WebElement elementSelector =driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("input[type='submit']")); 

3. Xpath: Locates elements matching an Xpath expression.

WebElement elementXpath =driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[@type='submit']")); 

4. Name: Finds elements with a name attribute that includes the specified value.

WebElement elementName =driver.findElement(By.name("nameValue")); 

5. ClassName: Finds elements with a class name attribute that includes the specified value.

WebElement elementClassName =driver.findElement(By.className ("classValue")); 

6. TagName: Select elements by their HTML tag.

WebElement elementTagName =driver.findElement(By.tagName ("html tagName"));

7. LinkText: Finds links by their exact text.

WebElement elementLinkText =driver.findElement(By.linkText ("Text in the Link")); 

8. Partial LinkText: Locates anchor elements whose visible text contains the search values. If multiple elements are matching, only the first one will be selected.

WebElement elementPartialLinkText = driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText ("Partial Text in the Link"));

findElements(): method returns a list of matching elements, or an empty list if none are found.

Syntax

List<WebElement> listOfElements = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//div"));

Below are some examples of ID

List<WebElement> elements = driver.findElements(By.id("globalContainer"))