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Coming from Selenium PageFactory — what replaces @FindBy and initElements?

3 answers

• Accepted answer

  Did exactly this move over about four months. The mapping that held up:

  • @FindBy(...) field becomes a readonly field built with this.heal.locator(primary, context), where the primary is the locator you believe in and the context is what the healer may fall back to.
  • PageFactory.initElements(driver, this) becomes nothing at all. pages.get(LoginPage) constructs the class lazily with the scenario's page, the resolved config and the healer, and caches one instance per class per scenario.
  • The driver in your base class becomes BasePage, which gives you page, goto(routeName), heal and shots, plus popup, frame, upload and download helpers.
  • Explicit waits mostly disappear, because Playwright auto-waits and the assertions retry.
  • The glue package disappears too, and this is the part that felt strange for a week: the step text sits on the method as a decorator, so the page object and the step definition are one file.

  tsCopy

  @Fixture<typeof test>('cartPage')
  export class CartPage extends BasePage {
    readonly checkout = this.heal.locator(this.page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Checkout' }), {
      role: 'button',
      name: 'Checkout',
      testId: 'checkout',
      description: 'checkout button',
    });
  
    @Given('I am on the cart page')
    async open() {
      await this.goto('cart');
    }
  
    @When('I check out')
    async checkOut() {
      await this.checkout.click();
    }
  }

  The one thing I would not port is the XPath. Translate those fields to role and name while you have the page open in front of you; you will never have a better moment to do it.

  AHanswered by Avery Hollis

  Reply

• Agreeing with the above and adding the bit that decides how much value you get out of the move.

  Every heal context needs a description. It is the label in reports and the key the fragility statistics are aggregated under, so a context without one is a locator SDODS cannot say anything useful about later.

  Contexts that match several elements are worse than no context. text: 'Add' on a product grid lowers the score and can resolve to the wrong element.

  TBanswered by Tomas BrekkeSDODS team

  Reply

• One ordering suggestion from doing a smaller version of this: port the base class last.

  It is tempting to start there because it is shared, but you end up designing an abstraction for pages you have not converted yet. Convert two modules end to end with everything inline, then look at what actually repeats. In my case about half of what our old base class did was already in BasePage, and a third of the rest was waits I no longer needed.

  MKanswered by Marijn Kuiper

  Reply

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