Working with Tables using the Selenium WebDriver and Katalon Studio

While Katalon is capable of reading a table through an object declaration, it’s possible to do the same using the “Webdriver”, “List” and “findElement” commands. I use this method to count the number of rows in a dynamically generated table. It would be equivalent to the storeXPathCount from the Selenium IDE.

Many of the tables I work with are static, meaning the number of rows doesn’t change. For example, we have a table for months, that’s always 12. We have a table for categories, that’s always 10. However, we have a table for customers, and that’s always different.

I have a couple of tests where I need to know the number of customers in that table. To find out, I use the Webdriver to create a List of table rows, then get the Size of that List.

I’ve also used this method when working with Contacts. We don’t display a count for the number of Contacts, but I can use the WebDriver to get a count of the objects I’m interested in, make a new one, then count them again to make sure it’s increased by one.

These commands come from standard Selenium and can be found in many useful examples. To get started we need a few new import statements.

import com.kms.katalon.core.webui.driver.DriverFactory as DriverFactory
import org.openqa.selenium.By as By
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement as WebElement
import com.kms.katalon.core.annotation.Keyword as Keyword

Additional statements for logging would be:

import com.kms.katalon.core.logging.KeywordLogger as KeywordLogger

KeywordLogger log = new KeywordLogger()

Once those are declared, define the “Webdriver”

WebDriver driver = DriverFactory.getWebDriver()

With those in place, I can use the following code to count the number of items returned in my List.

WebElement Webtable = driver.findElement(By.id('sales_dash_table')) // Replace TableID with the Actual Table ID or Xpath reference
//Get the number of rows in the table and turn it into a List
List<WebElement> TotalRowCount = Webtable.findElements(By.xpath('//*[@id=\'sales_dash_table\']/tbody/tr'))
//Display the number of rows in the table for the given sales rep
log.logWarning('No. of Rows in the WebTable: ' + TotalRowCount.size())
//Loop through the table and output the information to Log File
//Read columns 1-8, assign each to a variable, then output the result to the Log File
for (int loop = 1; loop <= TotalRowCount.size(); loop++) {
 customerName= driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[@id='sales_dash_table']/tbody/tr[" + (loop)+ "]/td[1]")).getText();
 log.logWarning('Customer Name:=' + customerName)
 sales = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[@id='sales_dash_table']/tbody/tr[" + (loop)+ "]/td[2]")).getText();
 log.logWarning('Sales Figure Amount:=' + sales)
 plan = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[@id='sales_dash_table']/tbody/tr[" + (loop)+ "]/td[3]")).getText();
 log.logWarning('Plan Value:=' + plan)
}

In my example, the WebElement is set to the variable WebTable, which corresponds to the ID “sales_dash_table”. The table I’m looking for has an ID of “sales_dash_table” defined within the CSS code. I want to look for that table, then count the number of rows in that table that are returned with the List command.

The By.xpath(“//*[@id=’sales_dash_table’]/tbody/tr” is the actual definition I want to count, in this case, the TR[].

The //* is a wildcard for all the div commands that are in front of the definition.

This is the standard Selenium method for manipulating a table and it works just the same in Katalon. In most cases I’m able to use an object definition, but when the table has an unknown length, it can be easily traversed with the WebDriver.