Selenium Cucumber Java BDD Framework Class 7: Page Factory

Page Factory:
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1 - What is Page Factory
2 - How to implement Page Factory

What is Page Factory:

- A simple and easier implementation of Page Object Model in Selenium
- Selenium’s inbuilt and optimized Page Object Model concept
- As POM, has separation of objects and tests
- Uses annotation @FindBy to find WebElements
@FindBy can use id, name, css, xpath, tagName, linkText, partialLinkText etc
- Uses method initElements to initialize web elements
on calling initElements method all objects on that page gets initialized

Demo How to implement Page Factory Model
Step 1 - Create a class for each page
Step 2 - Create locators of all objects to be used in that page using @FindBy
Step 3 - Create methods or actions to be performed on the objects
Step 4 - Create constructor to get driver instance and
initialize Elements using method initElements
public LoginPage(WebDriver driver) {
this.driver = driver;
PageFactory.initElements(driver, LoginPage.class);
}
Step 5 - Update Test Scripts to refer methods from PageFactory class
Step 6 - Run and validate

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@CacheLookup
CacheLookup can be used to instruct the InitElements() method to cache the element once its located and so that it will not be searched over and over again whenever calling it from any method

@FindBy(id = "name")
@CacheLookup
WebElement txt_username;

This works well with a basic web application, but not recommended if you have Ajax applications where DOM changes on user actions.
In case you get StaleElementExceptions, avoid using this.

Useful Tips 2
In Ajax applications to handle loading time for element and to avoid
‘No Element Exception’, we can use

AjaxElementLocatorFactory Class
timeout for a WebElement can be assigned to the Object page class with the help of AjaxElementLocatorFactory

AjaxElementLocatorFactory factory = new AjaxElementLocatorFactory(driver, 30);
PageFactory.initElements(factory, this);

The above code will wait for maximum of 30 seconds until the elements specified by annotations is loaded.
If the element is not found in the given time interval, it will throw ‘NoSuchElementException' exception.

Useful Tips 3

With PageFactory, you can also locate a list of Elements

@FindBy(partialLinkText = "raghav")
List＜WebElement＞ myLinks;