Selenium IDE Xpath vs Webdriver Xpath - html

Question

I'm newbie with Test Automation. When I locating element through Firepath with target:
xpath=(//td[contains(#id, 'catProdTd_4723290')]/div/div[2]/h2)
Firefox founds that element and verify text.
But, when I trying to locate this element with Visual Studio 2012 and Selenium Web driver, I constantly have error: "Unable to locate element: {"method":"xpath","selector":"//td[contains(#id, 'catProdTd_4723290')]/div/div[2]/h2"}" .
I tried escaping:
//td[#id=\"catProdTd_4723290\"]/div/div[2]/h2
but nothing. When I use isElementPresent method, it founds elements.
Is there some special method or rule that should be use when writing Xpath for WebDriver ?
I defined ISelenium variable, WebDriver... Clicks works, WaitForPageToLoad works, but this can not locate element.
IWebElement we= driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//td[contains(#id, 'catProdTd_4723290')]/div/div[2]/h2"));
HTML from page:
<td class="productItem" id="catProdTd_4723290"><div class="product-details">
<div class="product-aside"> <img border="0" alt="Fork and Spoon Set" src="/_photos/store/glass-large.jpg" id="catlproduct_4723290">
</div>
<div class="product-main">
<h2 class="product-name">Fork and Spoon Set</h2>
<div class="price"><strong>$17.99</strong></div>
<hr>
<div class="attributes"></div>
<hr>
<div class="product-col-1">
<div class="qty"> Quantity: <strong><input type="text" value="1" name="AddToCart_Amount" class="productTextInput" id="Units_4723290"></strong></div>
<div class="stock">(N/A in-stock)</div>
</div>
<div class="product-col-2">
<input type="submit" onclick="AddToCart(192951,4723290,'',4,'','',true);return false;" value="Buy Now" name="AddToCart_Submit" class="productSubmitInput">
<div class="wish">Add to Wishlist</div>
</div>
<div class="product-description">
<h4>Product Information:</h4>
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean
commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus
</div>
</div>
<!-- End Main -->
</div>
<!-- End Product Details -->
</td>
I must add that I try to wait during debug and with
Manage().Timeouts().ImplicitlyWait
but nothing. This happens on other places also. I using Firefox for tests

Answer 1

You are running into dynamic attributes.
My first recommendation to you. Switch to CSS.
My second recommendation, instead of boiling down into an entire parent-child hierarchy, why don't you just KISS!
So, lets look at your issue. You are trying to fetch the product name. Easy.. we can use classes here.
css=td.productItem h2.product-name
voila, it was that easy to fetch.. instead of having this huge ugly xpath selector, we've simplified it to a css selector.
So onto the next problem, if we have multiple of td.productItem's on the page, we can use a couple things.
Try,
css=td.productItem:nth-child(1) h2.productName
That will select the first td with class, productItem.
note: you may need to specify the td's parent.. e.g. css=div#container td.productItem:nth-child(1)
More specifics...
The reason your xpath is failing, is because of that catProdTd_4723290 id assigned to the <td> element being generated automatically, rendering that element unselectable. You can work around that, by doing starts with. for example, with css -
css=td[id^='catProdTd']
will select that <td> take note though, that there might be more than 1 element selected.

Answer 2

I suggest using such a method for waiting:
public bool boolWaitForElementIsDisplayed(By locator, int secondsToWait)
{
WebDriverWait Wait = new WebDriverWait(Driver, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(secondsToWait));
try
{
var FoundElement = Wait.Until<Boolean>(d =>
{
try
{
return (d.FindElement(locator).Displayed && d.FindElement(locator).Enabled);
}
catch
{
return false;
}
});
}
catch (WebDriverTimeoutException)
{
return false;
}
return true;
}
and then check as follows:
IWebElement h2Element = null;
string xpath = "//td[contains(#class,'productItem')]/div/div[contains(#class,'product-main')]/h2";
if (boolWaitForElementIsDisplayed(By.XPath(xpath), 30))
h2Element = Driver.FindElement(xpath);

Answer 3

So, the problem was that page isn't loaded. Why? Because WebElement.Click() not works. Why Click not working?! I don't know.
I resolved problem with clicks using JavascriptExecutor:
IJavaScriptExecutor executor = (IJavaScriptExecutor)chauffeur;
IWebElement webel1 = chauffeur.FindElement(By.CssSelector("#nav ul:nth-child(1) li:nth-child(2) a[href='/products']"));
Instead of using
webel1.Click();
which not works, I used:
executor.ExecuteScript("arguments[0].click();", webel1);