Selenium 2 - Can findElement(By.xpath) be scoped to a particular element?

Question

All the examples of findElement(By.xpath) I\'ve seen search the whole page, e.g.

WebElement td = driver.findElement(By.xpath(\"//td[3]\"));

Answer 1

what i m understanding that u want to retrieve a particular td from a tr, so here's a snippet you can try it with your code to find 3rd td...



WebElement tr=//...find a particular table row 
    List<WebElement> columns = tr.findElements(By.tagName("td"));
    Iterator<WebElement> j = columns.iterator();
    int count=0;
    while(j.hasNext())  
            {   
                WebElement column = j.next();
                if(count==2)
                {
                    System.out.print(column.getText());
                }
                count++;
            }

You can change count value in if condition to retrieve another td..
Hope this will help you..

Answer 2

I think this might be a bug in the way that Selenium2 uses xpath. However, I believe I've successfully limited the scope using "::ancestor" before.

In any event, have you tried using Css Selectors to solve this? Is that an option for you? Try this:

tr.findElement(By.cssSelectors("td:nth-of-type(3)"));

This should do the job and is the equivalent of what you tried initially:

tr.findElement(By.xpath("//td[3]"));

Answer 3

WebElement td = tr.findElement(By.xpath("/td[3]"));

If you only want to to find the child elements of the tr use a relative path not an absolute.

This should work:

int index = 3;
List<WebElement> tds = tr.findElements(By.xpath(".//td"));
System.out.println(tds[index].getText());

Answer 4

I also ran into this issue and spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out the workaround. And this is what I figured out:

WebElement td = tr.findElement(By.xpath("td[3]"));

Not sure why, but this works for me.

Answer 5

Based on ZzZ's answer I think the issue is that the queries you are trying are absolute instead of relative. By using a starting / you force absolute search. Instead use the tag name as ZzZ suggested, ./ or .//.

Look in the XPath docs under "Location Path Expression"