How do I add a JQuery locators to Selenium Remote Control

Question

I\'ve been using XPath with Selenium quite happily and even using getEval with a but of Javascript, but a colleague said wouldn\'t it be great to be able to use JQuery selec

Answer 1

Karl Swedberg wrote an excellent blog entry about it which can be found at http://www.learningjquery.com/2009/04/better-stronger-safer-jquerify-bookmarklet

We adapted this and basically in the Selenium Server jar file we modified RemoteRunner.html to include the jquery JavaScript (obtained from http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js):

Then to enable this for use in Selenium we add the location strategy:

mySelenium.addLocationStrategy("jquery",
            "var loc = locator; " +
            "var attr = null; " +
            "var isattr = false; " +
            "var inx = locator.lastIndexOf('@'); " +

            "if (inx != -1){ " +
            "   loc = locator.substring(0, inx); " +
            "   attr = locator.substring(inx + 1); " +
            "   isattr = true; " +
            "} " +

            "var found = jQuery(inDocument).find(loc); " +
            "if (found.length >= 1) { " +
            "   if (isattr) { " +
            "       return found[0].getAttribute(attr); " +
            "   } else { " +
            "       return found[0]; " +
            "   } " +
            "} else { " +
            "   return null; " +
            "}"
        );

Note the above addition of locator strategy is in Java but its just a string so should be easily replicated in C#. JQuery does make things a lot faster, especially in Internet Explorer!

To modify the jar you can use the java command line tool to update the downloaded selenium server jar. Make a folder at the same level as the jar called "core" and put the modified RemoteRunner.html and jquery.min.js files there. Then run something like:

jar -uf selenium-server-standalone-2.0b3-APT.jar core\RemoteRunner.html
jar -uf selenium-server-standalone-2.0b3-APT.jar core\jquery.min.js

If jar isn't in your path you can use the full path, for example on windows you could execute it with something like:

"C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_22\bin\jar.exe"