Understanding WebElement in Selenium

WebElement is used everywhere in selenium to perform various operations. But what is a WebElement? This post will talk about WebElement in detail.

A WebElement in Selenium is a Java interface representing a website’s HTML element. HTML element contains a start tag and an end tag with the content lying between those tags.

Syntax of a HTML element

<Tag> content </Tag>

HTML elements can be nested, as shown below –

<Tag1>
 <Tag2> 
   content
 </Tag2>
</Tag1>

So, let’s come back to the point that WebElement is an interface, not a class.

Declaration of the WebElement interface

public interface WebElement 
  extends SearchContext, TakesScreenshot

So, WebElement extends two more interfaces, SearchContext and TakesScreenshot.

SearchContext interface declares two methods that help find a single element or a list of elements depending on the situation. Below are the methods declared by the SearchContext interface –

• List<WebElement> findElements(By by);
• WebElement findElement(By by);

WebElement extends the SearchContext interface, ending up with the above methods.

TakesScreenshot interface declares only a single method that helps in taking the screenshot.

• X getScreenshotAs(OutputType target) throws WebDriverException;

Other than the above methods, the WebElement interface also declares some methods –

• void click()
• void submit()
• void sendKeys(CharSequence… keysToSend)
• void clear()
• String getTagName()
• String getAttribute(String name)
• boolean isSelected()
• boolean isEnabled()
• String getText()
• List<WebElement> findElements(By by) [ WebElement also declares the findElements method which is specified by the SearchContext interface]
• WebElement findElement(By by) [ WebElement also declares the findElement method, which is specified by the SearchContext interface]
• boolean isDisplayed()
• Point getLocation()
• Dimension getSize()
• Rectangle getRect()
• String getCssValue(String propertyName)

Now, the question is, if WebElement is only an interface, then which class is implementing its methods?

Many classes implement the WebElement interface, like RemoteWebElement, HtmlUnitWebElement, etc., and these classes implement the methods declared by the WebElement interface.

We cannot make objects of an interface in Java. But, we can call the interface methods with the interface’s reference variable, which is what we do while calling the methods of the WebElement interface.

      // Here webelement is the reference variable
     // of the WebElement interface
     webElement.clear();
     webElement.click();

Please read this section to understand the reference variables.

But the problem is still there. We cannot make objects of the WebElement as it’s an interface, and we need an object that implements the methods declared by the WebElement interface.

This is where two widely used methods come into the picture.

• List<WebElement> findElements(By by);
• WebElement findElement(By by);

findElement method returns an object that implements the WebElement interface methods, whereas findElements returns a list of those objects.

So, whenever we write WebElement element = findElement(By.id(“firstName”)), it essentially uses the WebElement interface reference variable and calls the object’s implementation returned by the findElement method.

     WebElement element = findElement(By.id("firstName"))

     // Here webelement is the reference variable
     // of the WebElement interface
     webElement.clear();
     webElement.click();

A WebElement can be of any type. It can be a text, button, checkbox, or HTML element. The WebElement methods cannot be applied to each element type like we cannot clear a button, so we shouldn’t use the clear() method on a button element type. Using methods not supported by the element type may or may not result in an error.

List of WebElement methods in Selenium

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