Getting Started with Selenium with Java | Installation & Setup

                            

Getting Started with Selenium WebDriver in Java

Selenium is an open-source automation tool that is widely used for web application testing. In this tutorial, we will cover the basics of Selenium in Java, including how to install and set up the environment, how to locate elements on a web page, and how to perform basic actions such as clicking a button or entering text into a text field.

Step 1: Install Selenium

To get started with Selenium in Java, you will need to first install it on your machine. You can do this by downloading the Selenium Java Client Library from the official website: https://www.seleniumhq.org/download/.

Step 2: Download the WebDriver

In order to interact with a web browser, Selenium uses a web driver. There are different web drivers for different web browsers. For example, to automate Chrome, you need to use the ChromeDriver. To automate Firefox, you need to use the GeckoDriver.

You can download the web driver for the browser you want to automate from the following links:

ChromeDriver:  Click here for Chrome Drivers

GeckoDriver: Click here for Firefox drivers

Step 3: Set up the Environment

Before you can start writing Selenium scripts, you need to set up the environment. This includes adding the Selenium library and the web driver to your project. 

You can add the Selenium library by including the selenium-java-3.141.59.jar file in your project's classpath. You can also add the web driver by including the chrome driver executable in your project.

Step 4: Create an instance of the WebDriver

Once the Selenium Library is imported, you can create an instance of the WebDriver. To do this, you need to specify the path to the web driver that you downloaded in step 2. For example, to create an instance of the ChromeDriver, you would use the following code:

System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "path/to/chromedriver");
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
 

Step 5: Navigate to a website

Now that you have an instance of the WebDriver, you can use it to navigate to a website. To do this, you can use the get() method and pass in the URL of the website you want to visit. For example, to navigate to the Google website, you would use the following code:

driver.get("https://www.google.com");

Step 6: Locate Elements on the Page

Once you have navigated to a website, you can use Selenium to locate elements on the page. Selenium provides several methods to locate elements on a web page. For example, you can use the findElement() method to locate an element by its ID, name, class name, or CSS selector. You can also use the findElements() method to locate multiple elements that match a specific criteria. For example:

WebElement searchBar = driver.findElement(By.name("q"));

Step 7: Perform Actions on Elements

Once you have located an element on the page, you can perform various actions on it such as clicking, entering text, or selecting an option from a drop-down list. For example, to enter text into a text field, you can use the sendKeys() method:

searchBar.sendKeys("Selenium Tutorials");

Similarly, to click on a button, you can use the click() method:

driver.findElement(By.name("btnK")).click();

Step 8: Extracting Data from the page

Selenium provides several methods to extract data from the page, such as getText(), getAttribute(), and getCssValue() method.

For example, to extract text from an element, you can use the getText() method:

String elementText = driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("some-css-selector")).getText();

Step 9: Close the browser

Once you have finished performing the actions and extracting the data, you should close the browser. You can do this by using the close() method:

driver.close();

That's it, you have successfully set up Selenium in Java, navigated to a website, located elements on the page, performed actions on them and extracted data from the page.

It's important to note that this is just a basic tutorial and Selenium has many more features and functionalities. I encourage you to continue learning and experimenting with Selenium to become proficient in automating web applications.