How to make a selection from a dropdown using Selenium/Python

Question

I've been trying to make a selection from a drop down but cannot seem to figure out how.

Here's what I'm trying to get:

<div id="quote-status" class="panel panel-default">
<div class="panel-heading">
 <a class="clickable" ng-click="toggleCollapse();">
 <i class="glyphicon glyphicon-expand ng-hide" ng-show="collapsed"></i>
 <i class="glyphicon glyphicon-collapse-down" ng-hide="collapsed"></i>
 <strong>Quote Status</strong>
 </a>
</div>
<div class="panel-body collapse in" collapse="collapsed" style="height: auto;">
 <div class="row">
 <!-- ngIf: quote.quoteLabels && (quote.quoteLabels.length > 0) -->
 </div>
 <div class="row">
 <div class="col-md-3">
 <p><b>*&nbsp;Choose a Status:</b></p>
 <select class="form-control ng-pristine ng-valid" ng-model="quote.labelId" ng-change="statusSelectChange()" ng-options="i.id as i.labelName group by i.categoryName for i in labelTypes | filter:{ active : '1' } | orderBy:'priority'">
 <option value="" class=""></option>
 <optgroup label="Potential Customer">
 <option value="0">Low Priority</option>
 </optgroup>
 </select>
 </div>
 </div>
</div>

I would like to set option 0 as my value. I'm trying to get the value using:

myselect = Select(driver.find_element_by_class_name("form-control"))
myselect.select_by_value("0")

For this given example, it says that the element is an input, not a select object, when it try to use ng-valid or ng-pristine I get:

selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"class name","selector":"ng-valid"

Not sure what to do at this point. We're using angular.js on top of a php built web app.

• demouser123: Your classname selector is not correct. You have compound classes in your angular JS code, while you're using a single classname to access it. You need to access this using all classnames. Also, this can be easily done using protractor using ng-model locator (in case you want to try it)
• QAguy: @bad_deadpool Thanks, I did some digging and found something promising called pytractor, however it doesnt seem to be actively developed or maintained. I'm going to take a shot at using protractor now.

Answer 1

This is working for me using UI's Select option. e.g.:

from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import Select
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
# Locate the Sector and create a Select object
select_element = Select(driver.find_element_by_css_selector(".form-control"))
# this will print out strings available for selection on select_element, used in visible text below
print [o.text for o in select_element.options]
# select by visible text
select_element.select_by_visible_text("Low Priority")
# or select by value
select_element.select_by_value('0')
# or select by option index
select_element.select_by_index(1)

Documentation here and some credit to Daniel Abel here.

I'm a bit concerned your error may be coming from somewhere else as the error you're getting is selenium unable to find an element with the class of ng-valid, which isn't included in your example selenium code. Also, with Angular be sure to throw in a wait for the angular page to load. Like:

from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait # Import at top of file
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
# Selenium waits for the page to load, but not necessarily the angular app
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10)
wait.until(EC.presence_of_element_located('ng-valid'))

You may want to use protractor anyway as it has some custom locators for angular and will wait for ng-app to load by default.

Answer 2

 def select_dropdown_value(self, locator, value):
 selectOption = Select(self.driver.find_element(*locator))
 option_selected = selectOption.select_by_value(value)

Answer 3

One of the best features of Python is interactive debugger pdb.

So every time I am not sure how a Python feature works, I drop to debugger and interrogate the object instance for method and how it works:

import pdb
pdb.set_trace()

which can be done on single line, easier to comment/uncomment:

import pdb; pdb.set_trace()

Put this after you created the myselect object, and try it. dir(myselect) will show you all the methods it has. More fun than reading the docs - but you still should read the docs, and use this trick to test your understanding.

Answer 4

I don't normally use python for my automation work so I apologize that I can't speak to the exact problem you're experiencing with your code, however in the languages I'm more familiar with I usually shortcut "choose an option from a dropdown" by interacting directly with the option and ignoring a two-click approach.

driver.findElement(by.xpath("//select[@ng-model='quote.labelId']/option[@value='0']")).click()

Here I look for the select tag you're trying to interact with (for your provided html, narrowing by ng-model was excessive), look for its child with the value you're trying to get, then I select it with a click.