What is a CheckBox?
Imagine we are designing an online survey form for a website and we want to gather information about the user’s hobbies. We can use checkboxes to allow users to select one or more hobbies from a list of hobbies. Checkboxes are the graphical user interface elements that allow users to select or deselect an item from a list of options, they will enable users to make binary choices either selecting or deselecting an item from a list of options. In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to locate and handle checkboxes in Selenium Web Driver.
Here I’m using a sample website for practice
How to handle a Checkbox in Selenium-
To interact or handle a checkbox we first need to locate them on the web page then we check if the checkbox is selected or not and then we select or deselect a checkbox according to our need
Steps to handle checkbox in Selenium-
- Locate the Checkbox
- Check if the checkbox is Selected or Not
- Select or Deselect a Checkbox
1. How to Locate a Checkbox
Selenium provides multiple locators for locating a checkbox, some of them are-
- ID
- CLASSNAME
- XPATH
- CSS-SELECTOR
- NAME
Let’s look into our sample page for a better understanding Here as we can see in our DOM, our checkbox has a class of Automation so we can use CLASS_NAME locator to locate it
find_element()- is a method in selenium web driver which is used to find elements using a locator. It returns the first element that matches the condition.
find_elements()- find_elements is similar to find_element but instead of returning the first element, find_element returns a list of all the elements that match the condition
By:
We could also use other methods to locate the element such as
- By. ID
- By.NAME
- By.XPATH
- By.CSS_SELECTOR
Python
# Importing modules from selenium import webdriver from selenium.common import NoSuchElementException from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By # Creating WebDriver instance for Chrome. driver=webdriver.Chrome(); # Define the URL of the webpage to be tested. url="https://artoftesting.com/samplesiteforselenium" # Navigating to the webpage. driver.get(url) # Try to locate the checkbox element by its CLASS_NAME try: checkbox = driver.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, "Automation") except NoSuchElementException: # If the element is not found, print "Not Found". print("No Found") else: # If the element is found, print "Found". print("Found") # Close the WebDriver when done. driver.quit() |
Here if we have successfully located the element the Process finished with exit code 0
else it will throw a NoSuchElementException exception.
Output:
Selenium Handling Checkbox
Selenium Handling Checkbox
2. How to check if the Checkbox is Selected or Not?
Selenium has a special method to check if a checkbox is selected or not
- is_selected()– used to check if a checkbox is Selected or Not, return true if it’s selected else false
Python
# Importing modules. from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By # Creating WebDriver instance for Chrome. driver = webdriver.Chrome() # Define the URL. url = "https://artoftesting.com/samplesiteforselenium" # Open the webpage in the WebDriver. driver.get(url) # Locate the checkbox element by its class_Name. checkbox = driver.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, "Automation") # Click on the checkbox. checkbox.click() # Check if the checkbox is selected. if checkbox.is_selected(): print("Checkbox is selected") # Close the WebDriver driver.quit() |
Output: False
Selenium Handling Checkbox
The output of the following will be false as we have not selected the checkbox
Selenium Handling Checkbox
3. How to select or deselect a checkbox?
Once we find the checkbox, the next thing we want to do is select or deselect the element. But to select or de-select an element we first have to check if it’s enabled or not.
Here are the methods which will help us do so.
- is_enabled()- used to check if an element is enabled or not. Return type- boolean
- click()- used to click an element
Python
# Importing modules from Selenium from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By # Initializing Chrome WebDriver driver = webdriver.Chrome() # write the URL of the website to be opened url = "https://artoftesting.com/samplesiteforselenium" # Open the website in the Chrome browser driver.get(url) # Find the checkbox element by its class_Name checkbox = driver.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, "Automation") # Check if the checkbox is enabled if checkbox.is_enabled(): # If the checkbox is enabled print a message (Checkbox is selected) print("Checkbox is selected") checkbox.click() # Close the browser window driver.quit() |
Output: selected
Here in the if block we check if our checkbox is enabled or not, and if it is enable we use the click() method to select the checkbox.
Selenium Handling Checkbox
Selenium Handling Checkbox
Selenium Handling Checkbox
Selenium is one of the most powerful tools for testing and automating web applications. the significance lies in its ability to perform repetitive tasks and automate web applications. It allows developers, testers, and QA professionals to interact with web applications and conduct automation tests.
One of the most common tasks in web applications is handling checkboxes in web forms. Checkboxes are graphical user interface elements that allow users to make binary choices by selecting or deselecting a small box. They are commonly used in web forms to gather user preferences or select multiple items from a list.