Getting the number of pages in a pagination ribbon

For a recent test, I needed to determine the number of pages available in a pagination ribbon. My goal was to make sure I could go from the first page to the last page and back again. This would validate the pagination ribbon was working and would have a different number of pages for different filtered results.

As a simple test, I read the first name on the page, jump to the end, read the name on the page and make sure the two are different. When I get back to Page 1, I read the first name again and make sure it’s the same name as when I read it the first time.

To start with, the pagination ribbon was a group of List Items with the ul and li tags. I first tried to work with it as an object, which will work, but in order to count the number of pages, I accessed it with the webdriver. I will still need to access the pagination ribbon as an object so I can click the correct page.

To illustrate, the pagination ribbon looks like this:

pagination

The pagination ribbon is defined as:

[@id='root']/div/div/div[2]/div/div/div[4]/ul/li

In order to work with it later, I defined an object as:

//div[@id='root']/div/div/div[2]/div/div/div[4]/ul/li[${Variable}]

To count the number of LI items and thus number of pages, I used this:

WebDriver driver = DriverFactory.getWebDriver()
//Determine the number of elements available in the pagination ribbon
WebElement Webtable=driver.findElement(By.id("root"));
//Get the number of list items in the ribbon and turn it into a List
List<WebElement> TotalRowCount=Webtable.findElements(By.xpath("//*[@id='root']/div/div/div[2]/div/div/div[4]/ul/li"));
lastPageOfPagination=TotalRowCount.size()

Now I have the total number of pages contained within the ribbon and the range I can move around in. Since the LI element accepts a variable as part of the object, I can jump to any page I choose.

I then use this code to jump to the end.

//Click the last page on the ribbon
lastPage=WebUI.getText(findTestObject('Page_/Dashboard/link-Pagination Ribbon', [('Variable') : (lastPageOfPagination-1)]))

This code gets me back to the first page:

//Return to page 1 of the pagination ribbon
WebUI.click(findTestObject('Page_/Dashboard/link-Pagination Ribbon', [('Variable') : startOfPagination]))

Because a filter can return zero results, I added some logic to force the upper and lower boundaries. For my site, the ribbon still displays for no results with the symbols for first and last page. For that case, I still get the upper limit as listed above, but then subtract 1 to show the lower limit.

Based on the number of our pagination ribbon, the code looks like this:

if (lastPageOfPagination<=4){
startOfPagination=2
} else {
startOfPagination=3
}

When there are results, Page 1 shows at position 3. When there are no results, pagination starts at position 2.

Ribbons may act differently, but it should be possible to count them using the webdriver and know exactly how many pages you are working with.

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