Locating Dynamic Elements in Date Widget

While automating modern web pages with much dynamic content, learning to use Advanced XPath expressions is important. This article discusses advanced Xpath expression for locating dynamic elements in date widgets.

Let us take the following scenarios where we need to find the XPaths for the dynamic date elements:

1. Fetch Today's date in the date widget.
2. Fetch Tomorrow's date in the date widget.
3. Fetch the 'Today + n days' date in the date widget.

Fetch Today's Date

In most cases, there will be a distinct class name for today's date html element. This will be different for different date libraries, but a pattern exists. We need to find this pattern to get the XPath for today.

In this case, we have JqueryUI's date picker, where you can see that the class name consists of highlight. So, we can write XPath for today as:

//td/a[@class='ui-state-default ui-state-highlight']

Fetch Tomorrow's Date

Based on the above example, we have XPath for today. For the next day, i.e., tomorrow, it would be the following 'td' element as shown below:

//td/a[@class='ui-state-default ui-state-highlight']/following::td[1]

Fetch 'Today + 7 days' Date

Based on the above example, we have XPath for today and tomorrow. For the 7th day, i.e., seven days from today, it would be the following td element with postion=7 as shown below:

//td/a[@class='ui-state-default ui-state-highlight']/following::td[7]