[🚀 Feature]: Get element locator from WebElement

[skyhirider]

Feature and motivation

This request has been opened once and closed with the redirect to open change for w3c webdriver specification, but was redirected back here from w3c - w3c/webdriver#1829

Each WebElement must have a By locator that uniquely locates it.
As far as I can tell, the locator is protected and not available.
There are cases when pulling it out and re-using it would be helpful.
I propose exposing a getter for the By locator.

Usage example

You initialize a web element and it eventually becomes stale.
To refresh it, you either need to

remember the locator and re-load it by calling the locator. Not always possible if you pass the element around
use the @ findby annotation so it auto refresh when stale. Can't use that if locators need to have variables.
If I need to check if an element exists

I used @ findby, can't do that as it will patiently wait until it times out. Need to do a driver.findElementsBy(locator..).size()>0 , but can't as I can't reach the By to do this. So I copy paste my locator, once in annotation and once as a By in my fields, effectively duplicating code
if I do the same thing with a webelemennt I previous located, I can at least catch a stale exception and handle that, but would be nicer if I could get the by and fire up findelements to check if it still exists.
What if, instead, we could get the locator from each element. Would help with duplicating locators, as well as constructing new webelements or running the locators against the page again.

[github-actions]

@skyhirider, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

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Thank you!

[titusfortner]

Thanks for the request.

PageFactory and FindBy were intended to be an example for how to create reusable code abstractions. For a number of reasons the implementation has turned out not to be ideal. I discuss it a bit more here — https://titusfortner.com/2021/02/03/page-factory-optimization.html

We keep it in the project for backwards compatibility reasons, but we do not have the resources to actively maintain it, and we (I) periodically suggest the project bites the bullet and removes it entirely. But we're not there yet.

You absolutely should create element abstractions for your test suites, but there are a bunch of different legitimate ways to do it, and you can see what happened the last time we picked something to show off. Rather than continuing to create other abstractions that we think are better in one way or another, we leave it to the user to create the abstractions that makes the most sense for their use case.

I have an example of an element wrapper that I use for workshops here - https://github.com/titusfortner/craft_framework
There are better implementations out there, but this can give you some ideas for your code.

[github-actions]

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