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

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Inherited suite, roughly two hundred locators in this shape:

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'] },
);

Every time the results list gains a badge or a promo row, a chunk of them break, and they break with HEAL_FAILED rather than healing. The contexts are declared, so I expected at least some recovery. What am I supposed to do with two hundred of these?

locators heal page-objects

asked by Tanvi Bhatt

3 answers

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:
ts
```
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.
answered by Owen Brackley
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.
answered by Tomas BrekkeSDODS team
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.
answered by Lena Hartwig

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

3 answers

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