Selenium and JSF 2.0

When I a generate SelectOneMenu with JSF2.0 the the id I specified in the xhtml is attached to a generated ID from JSF.

e.g. out of my_fancy_id it generates开发者_如何学Go j_idt9:my_fancy_id

Now I want to test my page with Selenium 2 Web Driver. I try to re-find my select menu:

driver.findElement(By.id("my_fancy_id"));

Of course it does't find anything because the id is changed. What is the best way to find the select menu on the page?

Usually the id of the form is prepended to all element ids inside the form. If you don't set a form id, JSF does it for you (the 'j_idt9'). Solution: Assign an id to your form and try to use the full id in your findElementmethod, e.g.:

<h:form id="myForm">
 ...
</h:form>

Call it this way:

driver.findElement(By.id("myForm:my_fancy_id"));

or you can add <h:form prependId="false"> so that the id of the form does not get prepended

You set the component identifier on controls; the renderers emit the client identifier to the markup.

This allows JSF to emit valid HTML ids (they must be unique) even in the face of templates and complex controls. A control will be namespaced by any parent that is a NamingContainer (such as a form).

In some containers, the client identifier will be namespaced by the view, but this generally only happens in portlet environments.

Some component libraries (like Tomahawk) have a forceId attribute, but care must be exercised in using them. I wrote a more extensive post on client identifiers here.