Action Designer and XPath Search

Owned by Stanislav N. (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Oct 19, 2021 by ZL Support
4 min read

Table of contents

Description

The action designer is a universal tool for working with page elements, which allows you to select the optimal signs for its search.

To use this feature, you need to have a basic understanding of the HTML markup language.

How to call?

There are two ways to call a designer:

  1. you need to right-click on the element of interest on the page and select to the action designer from the context menu.

2. The second method is from the Element Tree window. Right-click on the desired element and select to the action designer.

 

When an element is added to the Action Builder, its available properties and their attributes are automatically transferred to the Element Properties window.

Search options

1. Document №.

It is recommended to set the value -1 (search in all documents on the page). 

2. Form №.

It is also better to set -1 (search in all forms on the page). Choosing this value will make the template more versatile.

Example: on page 3 of the form - search, registration, ordering goods. We need to click on the button in the order form and we have chosen as the value of the “Form” field - 2 (numbering from zero). After some time, a new login form appears on the site, and it is inserted in front of the order form. Number 2 will now be the login form, and our template will either give an error that the button was not found, or (much worse) will click on another button in another form.

In the program settings (Settings → Recording), you can mark two checkboxes - “Search all forms on page” and “Search all documents on page” and then always when searching for elements for the document number and form will be -1.

3. Tag

HTML tag to find.

Example:

<div class="visible" id="username"></div>

div - this is a tag.

4. Attribute name

The HTML tag attribute for the search.

<div class="visible" id="username"></div>

class and id - attributes.

5. Value

The value of the attribute of the selected HTML tag

<div class="visible" id="username"></div>

visible and username - attribute values.

6. Search type

  1. text - search by full or partial text occurrence;

  2. notext - search for elements that do not contain the specified text;

  3. regexp - search using regular expressions
    By default RegeXp search is case insensitive. To change it you can prepend (?-i) to your expression (this mean “disable case insensitive mode”).

The screenshot shows that after clicking on the Search button, three elements were found, which is not very good - always try to select such search parameters so that in the end there is only one element.

With the help of XPath expressions, you can implement a more universal and resistant to changes in site layout algorithm for finding elements, in comparison with classic search or regular expressions.

Document number and form number are responsible for the same as in the classic search.

1. XPath

XPath expression input field.

2. Options

Here you can select one of the suggested expression designer.

Action selection

You can choose one of three possible actions

Set - Setting a value

  • Attribute - an attribute of an element for which a new value must be set

  • Value is the text to be inserted. You can use both plain text and project variables {-Variable.someVar-} , {-Profile.Name-} .

 

Get - Getting a value

  • Attribute - the attribute whose value you want to get.

  • Value - the value of the found attribute will be displayed here.

 

Rise - Rise event

  • here you can select the required action to be done with the found element.

 

  • Two additional fields are available for drag and drop actions, for coordinates

 

Final actions

1. Test

After you have selected the necessary search parameters and decided on the desired action, it does not hurt to test the selected parameters by clicking the appropriate button.

2. Comment

It's not a bad idea to leave a comment for the action as automatic comments carry little information

Comments
default

 

The same actions, only
with custom comments

 

3. Adding to the project

And already at the very end, when the parameters are selected, the element is found, the required action is selected and tested, you can click Add to project.