What is the most efficient selector to use with findElement()?

Question

When working with Selenium web testing, there are a few ways to identify WebElements.

In my experience, I have used the following selectors:

• Cl

Answer 1

Locators should be descriptive, unique, and unlikely to change. So my priority is as follows:

1. ID - You'll get the exact element you want and it can be descriptive and won't be changed by mistake.
2. Class - Very descriptive, probably unique in context of parent element.
3. CSS - Better performence than XPath - see Dave Haeffner's great benchmark.
4. XPath - Has capabilities that CSS doesn't like Axis e.g. ::parent and functions like contains().

I would avoid LinkText and TagName as they tend to cause unexpected failures due to very generic filtering.

Note on CSS and XPath: Using these with something like //div/li[1]/*/span[2] or div > li:nth-child(1) should also be avoided as they depend on the rendering and prone to changes.