Careeroza

XPath Axes

Moving Around the DOM

Sometimes the element you want has no good attribute, but a neighbour does. Axes let XPath move up, down or sideways.

<table id="orders">
  <tr><td>ORD-1001</td><td>Delivered</td><td><a href="/orders/1001">View</a></td></tr>
  <tr><td>ORD-1002</td><td>Shipped</td><td><a href="/orders/1002">View</a></td></tr>
</table>

Common Axes

Axis	XPath for the table above	Finds
`parent`	`//td[text()='ORD-1002']/parent::tr`	the row of order 1002
`following-sibling`	`//td[text()='ORD-1002']/following-sibling::td[1]`	its status: Shipped
`preceding-sibling`	`//td[text()='Shipped']/preceding-sibling::td`	the order id cell
`ancestor`	`//a[@href='/orders/1002']/ancestor::table`	the whole table
`descendant`	`//table[@id='orders']/descendant::a`	all View links

Example

String status = driver.findElement(
        By.xpath("//td[text()='ORD-1002']/following-sibling::td[1]")).getText();
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//td[text()='ORD-1002']/following-sibling::td/a")).click();
System.out.println("Status was " + status + ", now at " + driver.getCurrentUrl());

Example

Output:

Run OrderStatusTest.main()

Example output

Status was Shipped, now at https://shopease.example.com/orders/1002