Case Study: A Reliable Test Statement to Locate A Non-Unique Button

There are several ways, commonly people chose a less optimal one. This article shows a stable way, using Powerful XPath.

In web test automation, generally speaking, when there is a unique ID for the target element, we use the ID locator. However, at work, the IDs do not exist. This article show how to write a reliable automated step for a common operation where multiple buttons with the same text.

The web page below has several “Like” buttons in a table. BTW, this style of web page layout is fairly common.

Example 1. Button with Unique ID

To locate the “Like” button of TestWise.

The HTML fragment:

<tr>
  <td>TestWise</td>
  <td><span>2007</span></td>
  <td><a href="https://agileway.com.au/testwise">https://testwisely.com/testwise</a></td>
  <td><button id="like-testwise">Like</button></td>
</tr>

The automated test step.

Easy: use “ID” because there is one for the button.

1. Playwright

# Playwright
page.locator("#like-testwise")

2. Selenium WebDriver

driver.find_element(:id, "like-testwise")

Example 2. Button with no unique identifier or attributes