Selenium xpath arrays

Accessing xpath array elements in Selenium can be tricky! Sometimes you may have a number of elements on a page that can only be referenced with the same locator (for example, you can't rely on unique id's, only on some field they all have in common)

example:

a website has 4 buttons with 'addToCart' in onClick being the only reliable bit to check:

  ("//button[contains(@onclick,'addToCart')])

  you might think you could click on them by subscripting like this:

  sel.click("//button[contains(@onclick,'addToCart')][1]")

  sel.click("//button[contains(@onclick,'addToCart')][2]")

but no. the first one succeeds and fakes you into thinking you can access the array this way. but you can't. if you take out the [1] you get the same result. 

So what you have to do is isolate the array first, using the 'xpath=' notation, and then subscript it:

  sel.click("xpath=(//button[contains(@onclick,'addToCart')])[3]")

notice the use of 'xpath=' and the extra parens around the locator, followed by the subscript!

Reading Outlook Email With Python

There are several ways to read Outlook Email with Python, and I scouted around a number of blogs and websites to piece together a method that worked for me. This may not work for you, depending on how your company sets up its Outlook, but here it is, as a Python class

here is some usage ...

  outlook = OutlookLib()
  messages = outlook.get_messages('you@yourcompany.com')
  for msg in messages:
      print msg.Subject
      print msg.Body

and here is the class ...

import win32com.client

class OutlookLib:
        
    def __init__(self, settings={}):
        self.settings = settings
        
    def get_messages(self, user, folder="Inbox", match_field="all", match="all"):      
        outlook = win32com.client.Dispatch("Outlook.Application")
        myfolder = outlook.GetNamespace("MAPI").Folders[user] 
        inbox = myfolder.Folders[folder] # Inbox
        if match_field == "all" and match =="all":
            return inbox.Items
        else:
            messages = []
            for msg in inbox.Items:
                try:
                    if match_field == "Sender":
                        if msg.SenderName.find(match) >= 0:
                            messages.append(msg)
                    elif match_field == "Subject":
                        if msg.Subject.find(match) >= 0:
                            messages.append(msg)
                    elif match_field == "Body":
                        if msg.Body.find(match) >= 0:
                            messages.append(msg)
                    #print msg.To
                    #msg.Attachments
                        # a = item.Attachments.Item(i)
                        # a.FileName
                except:
                    pass
            return messages
        
    def get_body(self, msg):
        return msg.Body
    
    def get_subject(self, msg):
        return msg.Subject
    
    def get_sender(self, msg):
        return msg.SenderName
    
    def get_recipient(self, msg):
        return msg.To
    
    def get_attachments(self, msg):
        return msg.Attachments

Selenium RC and Confirmation Dialogs

This is worth noting. Sometimes in Selenium RC you will click on a button and it will bring up a confirmation dialog (Are You Sure You Want To Do This?)

Here's how to handle it in python-selenium


sel.choose_ok_on_next_confirmation() # will 'ok' the next one that comes up
sel.click('link='Delete') # your delete button
sel.get_confirmation() # absorbs the confirmation dialog