searching for a user given word in a webpage using c# and selenium

Question

I am trying to develop a selenium application (using c# win forms). So, while the application starts, the users will enter an app name in the text box. I have many fields such as cost, validity etc corresponding to each app.

Example webpage:

description appname cost validity xyzattribute
--------------------------------------------------
some desc app1 10 30 someattribute

I want selenium to search the entire page for that given app name and if it finds any, I want selenium to retrieve all the attributes (cost, validity) and store those in a variable. How can I achieve this?

Please note that none of these fields have a unique attribute (such as name/id/any other).

Answer 1

If I were you, I would take advantage of Seliniums ability to run and get results from arbitrary javascript commands. Let's assume you have a structure something like this:

<table id="mytable">
 <tr>
 <th>description</th>
 <th>appname</th>
 <tr>
 <tr>
 <td>description 1</td>
 <td>appname 1</td>
 <tr>
 <tr>
 <td>description 2</td>
 <td>appname 2</td>
 <tr>
<table>

To get the the description column value on the second row, you could run this javascript code:

var secondDescription = document.getElementById("mytable").rows[1].children[0].innerHtml

In C#, you first create an instance of IJavascriptExecutor (http://selenium.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/docs/api/dotnet/html/M_OpenQA_Selenium_IJavaScriptExecutor_ExecuteScript.htm):

IWebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(); //or whatever
IJavascriptExecutor jsDriver = (IJavaScriptExecutor) driver;

Then to get a value in C#, you simply run the javascript command:

string secondDescription = jsDriver.ExecuteScript("document.getElementById(\"mytable\").rows[1].children[0].innerHtml");