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Introduction
Welcome to yet another blog on Katalon Studio. Are you intrigued about understanding even the small-scale features of the Katalon Studio? Are you still confused about the resources? Well, you are at the right place.
This blog will take you through a series of fundamental concepts of Katalon Studio and some Common tips for using Xpath in Katalon Studio.
Let us get started! But before going any further, Let's discuss the word and world of Katalon Studio.
A product launched in the market should be thoroughly verified & tested. The product testing can be done either manually or automatically. The manual testing of API is very time-consuming. Hence, Automated Testing has become very popular these days. Katalon Studio steps in here. Based on Selenium, Katalon is one of the best and most used automated testing software with easy-to-use features.
Features of Katalon Studio
Katalon Studio helps in the automated testing of APIs as it has an inbuilt API testing module.
Automated scripts can be created which are easy and simple to use.
Katalon provides accessible features like snippets, a debugger, and code references.
Katalon Studio is compatible with other third-party testing tools like Swagger and Postman.
XPath
Before moving to the common tips for using XPath in Katalon Studio, we should know what XPath is and what XPath does.
XPath is an essential component of the XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language) standard that revolves around using the Extensible Markup Language (XML). XPath is a significant syntax expression in the XSTL Standard. XPath uses path expressions to define parts of an XML document and navigate in the XML documents. XPath contains a library of standard functions.
Common Tips for using Xpath in Katalon Studio
Refer to given source code given in the form of an example. (Note that the code reference is taken as https://docs.katalon.com/docs/legacy/katalon-studio-enterprise/test-execution/advanced-guides/web-testing/common-tips-for-using-xpath-in-katalon-studio)
There are various operators in Xpath described below.
XPath Best practices
We tend to follow some practices to use XPath in the best way possible if and when required.
1. Keeping the XPaths short makes it simple and easy to use. Using direct XPath (when there is a unique identifier present) is preferred.
2. In case a unique identifier is unavailable, one simple way is to find the nearest ancestor/descendant with a unique identifier and use the relative Xpath to locate the element.
3. One of the best practices is avoiding the use of absolute XPaths because it's not easy to use or maintain. The page's source code is made up of many elements between the root element and the object; it is complex. Hence, even the most minor changes in the page's source code can make the XPath invalid.
4. When a single attribute is not sufficient to identify an element, we use the XPath operator to get an element by multiple attributes.
5.Methods like contains(), text() and contains(haystack, needle) in XPath are used for test automation. text() returns a text of the current node, and contains() returns true/false based on some parameters.
How to get and verify XPaths
To verify the XPaths, we can refer to the following:-
There are various browser extensions that help in getting and evaluating XPaths. We can Choose one from the add-ons store in our favorite browser
To verify the XPaths manually, we can just Type $x("//path") into the console, and the element is returned in the console itself (if it exists).
An array of elements is returned when multiple elements match the expression.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which XPath wildcards are used to select unknown nodes in XML?
‘ * ’ can be used to match any element node. ‘ @* ’ can be used to match attribute node.
What does Absolute path mean in XPath?
The absolute path is the one that begins from the root node(‘/’).
In what languages we can use the XPath expressions?
Languages in which XPath expressions can be used are C++, Java, Javascript, C, Python and XML Schema.
Conclusion
We hope the blog helped you successfully understand the Common Tips for using XPath in Katalon. Firstly, We discussed Katalon Studio and its fundamental features, followed by an overview of some tips on when and how to use XPath.
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