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Our nth-child selectors break every sprint and healing never rescues them

readonly price = this.heal.locator(
  this.page.locator('.results > div:nth-child(3) > span:nth-child(2)'),
  { description: 'first result price', css: ['.results div:nth-child(3) span'] },
);

3 answers

• 27votes✓

  Accepted answer

  Two hundred is a migration rather than a fix, and it is worth doing in the order that gets you the most back first.

  • analyze_locators over the MCP server audits pages/, steps/ and recorded/ and reports the kinds it found — role, label, test id, css, xpath — plus whether each is heal-wrapped, and a fragility score
  • the reviewer agent will work over the same ground and write the rewrites as a proposal, so you review a diff instead of typing

  The target shape for that price is the row found by its content, then the cell inside it:

  tsCopy

  readonly price = this.heal.locator(
    this.page.getByRole('listitem').filter({ hasText: 'Widget' }).getByTestId('price'),
    { testId: 'price', description: 'first result price' },
  );

  If the application has no test ids on results, that is the change to ask for. It is smaller than rewriting two hundred selectors twice.

  OBanswered by Owen Brackley144 · 25 Apr 2025

  Reply
• 24votes

  Your contexts are declared, but they are declared with the same thing that broke.

  A css candidate has a base score of 0.4. The score is base × uniqueness × visibility × enabled + history with the bonus capped at 0.1, so the ceiling for CSS is 0.5 and minScore defaults to 0.6. A CSS-only context cannot heal — not because it is discouraged, because it cannot reach the threshold.

  Worse, nth-child describes precisely the thing your promo row changes. A structural selector with a structural fallback is one locator written twice.

  TBanswered by Tomas Brekkemaintainer33,915 · 24 Apr 2025

  Reply
• 8votes

  While you migrate, the interim that bought us time was declaring text as the fallback rather than CSS. Exact text has a base of 0.7 and clears the threshold when it is unique, so a locator with text: 'Add to basket' at least survives a structural change, even if it will not survive a copy change.

  Not a destination, but it turned red runs into logged heals while we worked through the list.

  LHanswered by Lena Hartwig10,388 · 28 Apr 2025

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