What's the purpose and upside of using By from selenium.webdriver.common.by instead of instead of the normal find_element_by_... methods? For example:
driver.find_element_by_id('some_ID')
vs:
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
driver.find_element(By.ID, 'some_ID')
According to documentation find_element() seem to be kind of "private" method that is used by find_element_by_...() methods and also might be used in Page Object
So using Page Object pattern is the reason why you might need find_element() + By instead of find_element_by_...().
For example, you have some variable that contains elements' id value
link_id = "some_id"
and you use it to locate element as
my_link = driver.find_element_by_id(link_id)
If for some reason id attribute was removed from element, you need both to update selector and replace find_element_by_...() method in my_link as
link_class_name = "some_class_name"
my_link = driver.find_element_by_class_name(link_class_name)
If you use By, then your initial locator might be
link_locator = (By.ID, "some_id")
and you locate your element as
my_link = find_element(*link_locator)
In case of changes in HTML source you need just to update your link_locator as
link_locator = (By.CLASS_NAME, "some_class_name")
and my_link remains exactly the same
driver.find_element("css selector", "[css='something']"? It seems like By is mostly useless because we could easily just pass in those strings ourselves.
By() class are simple strings and you can use "id" instead of By.ID, "xpath" instead of By.XPATH. I think it was made just to add little verbosity and also to simplify working in IDE- you can see available options when entering By., for example, in PyCharm
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By should mention thatLike above answer. I get the deprecated message when using find_element_by_id etc. So best way should be by using find_element().
Both of these methods are from the RemoteWebDriver class.
findElement(By.id()) requires you to created your own By.id instance.
findElementById(String) is a helper function that will generate the By.id
instance for you.
It comes down to providing you with the flexibility to choose what you want to keep track of in your tests/framework. Do you want to track locators as Strings? Do you want to track locators as By objects?
Python. Your explanations are not applicable in this exact case as there are several differences in Python+Selenium and Java+SeleniumAlso in the new python version, find_element_by_...() is removed, so just use find_element() + By
