Get Table Data

One of the most common tasks in our project is to retrieve data from a table in order to assert. With this post I will try to describe a unified way to get the required data from any table with a specific format so my assertions are well defined.
The assertion points to be well defined I usually prefer to have my actual data in the form of a Map(key,value) so my assertions are in the form

Assert.assertEquals(data.get(key),expected_value)

I selected the key value for my map to be the value of the first column with value a second map containing as keys the names of the columns and values the values of the columns.

Map(column_n_value:Map(column_2_name:column_2_value,…,column_n_name:column_n_value))

The aforementioned implementation for the key value pairs where chosen to be the table values instead of the table indexes for maintainability purposes. Maintainability wise a column addition or an non shorted table the index will return the wrong result while the value not.
The resulting assertions look like:

Assert.assertEquals(data.get(row_1_value).get(column_2_name),expected_value)
Assert.assertEquals(data.get(row_1_value).get(column_3_name),expected_value)

The first thing we need to do in order to construct our map is to get the number of rows and columns of the table as follows:

rows = selenium.getCssCount("css=table tbody tr").intValue()
columns = selenium.getCssCount("css=table tbody tr td").intValue()

With the number of rows and columns at hand the next step is to retrieve the names of the columns from the table header as follows in groovy:

public List<String> getTableColumnNames(){  
   def headerNames=[]  
   (1..selenium.getCssCount("css=table thead tr th").intValue()).each{columns->  
    if(!selenium.getText("css=table thead tr th" + ":nth-child(" + columns + ")").isEmpty()){  
      headerNames << selenium.getText("css=table thead tr th" + ":nth-child(" + columns + ")")  
    }
   return headerNames
}

Having the column names the next step is to construct the desired map as follows in groovy:

public HashMap<String, HashMap<String, String>> getTableInfo() {  
   selenium.waitForElement(componentName);  
   def TableMap=[:]    
   def columnNames = getTableColumnNames()  
   (1..selenium.getCssCount("css=table tbody tr").intValue()).each{row->  
     def columnMap=[:]
     (2..selenium.getCssCount("css=table tbody tr td").intValue()).each{column->  
      columnMap.put(columnNames[column-1],controller().getText(componentName + ":nth-child("+row+") *:nth-child("+column+")"))  
    }  
    TableMap.put(controller().getText(componentName + ":nth-child(" + row + ") td:nth-child(1)"),columnMap)  
   }  
   return TableMap;  
 }

The above implementation can be found embedded in Stevia, enriched with code detecting your locator style (Xpath, Css or Id).

The above implementation of the table scan could be altered to accept only td as columns by altering the column map to get

td:nth-child("+column+")

instead of

*nth-child("+column+")

Stevia includes similar methods such as: 

• getTableInfoAsList 
• getTableElements2DArray
• getTableElementTextUnderHeader

Categories: selenium, tables