How To Automate a Web Table in Selenium?

Web-tables are the tables displayed on the pages, which has data in the form of rows and columns.

There are two types of web-tables, and the very first thing that we need to know before automating is, whether the web-table is static or dynamic.

1. Static Web-tables: Number of rows and columns is defined.
2. Dynamic Web-tables: Rows and column count is unknown and can be anything.

Once we know, that our web-table is dynamic or static. We can follow below steps for automation of dynamic table:

1. use List <WebElement>
   • Create an xpath for the table element till /tr and get a count of the same. (This will give us the row count)
   • Similarly for columns the path should be till /th (From here we will get columns count)
2. Once, we get the row and column count, simply apply loop with i rows and j columns and perform your thing.
• A sample code for the same would be:
  • List <WebElement rows = webdriver.findElements(By.xpath("//table[@id=/"table_id_or_available_attribute/"]/tbody/tr"));
  • List <WebElement cols = webdriver.findElements(By.xpath("//table[@id=/"table_id_or_available_attribute/"]/tbody/tr/th"));
  for (int i =1; i<rows.size(); i++)
  {
      for (int j=0; j<cols.size(); j++)
      {
      here the xpath needs to //*[@id=/"table_id_or_available_attribute/"]/tbody/tr[i]/td[j]
      }
  }

If the table is static, we can follow the same process, however, the row/cols count step can be omitted. The row-count/col-count can be directly used in the above loop.
For better QA services we can make the XPath dynamic as mentioned inside the loop.