[FIXED] Get the By locator of an already found WebElement

Issue

Is there an elegant way to get the By locator of a Selenium WebElement, that I already found/identified?

To be clear about the question: I want the "By locator" as used to find the element. I am in this case not interested in a specific attribute or a specific locator like the css-locator.

I know that I could parse the result of a WebElement's toString() method:

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("myPreciousElement"));
System.out.println(element.toString());

Output would be for example:

[[FirefoxDriver: firefox on WINDOWS (....)] -> id: myPreciousElement]

if you found your element by xpath:

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div[@someId = 'someValue']"));
System.out.println(element.toString());

Then your output will be:

[[FirefoxDriver: firefox on WINDOWS (....)] -> xpath: //div[@someId = 'someValue']]

So I currently wrote my own method that parses this output and gives me the "recreated" By locator.

BUT is there a more elegant way already implemented in Selenium to get the By locator used to find the element?

I couldn't find one so far.

If you are sure, there is none out of the box, can you think of any reason why the API creators might not provide this functionality?

*Despite the fact that this has nothing to do with the question, if someone wonders why you would ever need this functionality, just 2 examples:

• if you use PageFactory you most likely will not have the locators as as member variables in your Page class, but you might need them later on when working with the page's elements.
• you're working with APIs of people who just use the Page Object Pattern without PageFactory and thus expect you to hand over locators instead of the element itself.*

Solution

tldr; Not by default, no. You cannot extract a By from a previously found WebElement. It is possible, however, through a custom solution.

It's possible to implement a custom solution, but Selenium does not offer this out-of-the-box.

Consider the following, on "why"..

By by = By.id("someId");
WebElement e = driver.findElement(by);

you already have the By object, so you wouldn't need to call something like e.getBy()

Answered By - ddavison