Merge lp://qastaging/~kenneth-koontz/selenium-simple-test/bug-828050 into lp://qastaging/selenium-simple-test

I looked at the implementation and I'm wondering if this is too much magic for the link_click() action.

the problem I see is..
if we add this to the regular link_click(), we lose the ability to click links with a specific id that is a substring of other id's.

for example, say the page has the following:

<a id="foo" href="/">link</a>
<a id="foobar" href="/">link</a>

it would no longer be possible to do:
link_click('foo') and click the first link,
since link_click('foo') would do a partial match and find both links.

so..

what about leaving link_click() as-is, and adding a new action to handle this instead:

maybe something like:

def partial_link_click(partial_id, check=False, wait=True)

thoughts?

-Corey

Corey, great point! I actually thought about extracting functionality and putting it into another action; however, I was left with the same thing. If we give the user the ability to add partial_id's, then the user can input any substring, like the aforementioned 'foobar' example. Which means that if we want to have partial locators with id's, the user must give some thought into the locator otherwise they will be left with an assertion error.

Take for instance a dynamic website that appends a unique key every time a new post is created. Suppose the string to append the key to is postlink. We would likely see postlink1, postlink2, ... postlink{n}. Furthermore, suppose there was another link element with the id, postlink-summary. In this case, link_click('postlink') won't work; but my question is-should it? Partial matching or not, if the user provides an ambiguous selector, they should be notified and there should be no action associated with it. So in link_click's case, if there is ambiguity in 'element_locator', the following line:

"""
if not get_element_by_xpath(element_locator).get_attribute('href')
"""

should catch this ambiguity in 'get_element_by_xpath'.

"""
if len(elements) != 1:
    msg = 'Could not identify element: %s elements found' % len(elements)
    _raise(msg)
"""

Thanks!

-K

What about adding the possibility to use regular expressions?

Leo, I'm not sure how regular expressions would work in this case. Can you provide an example or your thoughts?

Corey, is your stance still the same? Would you like me to just pull out the functionality from this merge and put it into a separate function? Say, partial_link_click()? What are your thoughts?