Pagefactory dynamic webelement with wildcard

Question

I have dynamically generated locators depends on which element is gonna be chosen from a list.

For instance, this is my generated id:

Function:TableName:0:submenuAction

0 is the counter, meaning first element is chosen from the list. All strings before and after the counter won't change, so start with, contains xpath method does not work.

Can I use some wildcard like Function:TableName:{X}:submenuAction {x} is integer.

I can store the chosen number of element, but how can I use this variable inside the pagefactory element? driver.findelement can fail with staleElementException,thats why I wanna use PageFactory.

Answer 1

Whatever you're passing in would probably have to be a constant (e.g. final static in Java) to be used in a PageFactory annotation.

private final static int ITEM_INDEX = 2;

...

@FindBy(xpath="Function:TableName:"+ ITEM_INDEX + ":submenuAction")
private WebElement targetListItem;

In addition to some of the stale checking strategies mentioned in the comment, you may also want to try binding all of those dynamically-identified elements to a collection (e.g. List<WebElement>), then indexing in:

@FindBy(xpath="...")
private List<WebElement> allListEntries;

...

private WebElement getTargetListEntry(int index) {
    return allListEntries.get(index);
}