Cloning element finders

问题

While researching available ElementFinder and ElementArrayFinder methods, I've noticed that there is a clone() method which is briefly documented:

Create a shallow copy of ElementFinder.

From what I understand, clone() is not coming from WebdriverJS and is a protractor-specific function. What I don't understand is why would you want to clone an element finder or an element finder "array" in your tests? What use cases does clone() cover?

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I've looked into the protractor source code to find example usages, but found only the underlying change set, which didn't help to have a clear picture.

回答1:

Clone was introduced here: https://github.com/angular/protractor/issues/1303. And honestly now I think about it, it was a mistake to introduce it, as it offers no practical values.

Originally, there was fear that subsequent chains of elementFinders would affect previous ones:

var outerElement = element(by.abc...).all(by.def...).first().element(by.ghi...);
var outerText = outerElement.getText();
var innerElement = innerElement.element(by.xyz...);
// Now that I chained more things onto outerElement, is the original outerElement still behaving the same as before? (i.e. is outerText the same as outerElement.getText() still)

来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29929848/cloning-element-finders