In this tutorial, we are going to study the handling of dropdowns in Selenium WebDriver. For practice, you can check the dummy page having a dropdown element.

Select in Selenium WebDriver

The ‘Select’ class in Selenium WebDriver is used for selecting and deselecting the option in a dropdown. The objects of Select type can be initialized by passing the dropdown webElement as a parameter to its constructor.

WebElement testDropDown = driver.findElement(By.id("testingDropdown"));
Select dropdown = new Select(testDropDown);

Selecting options from the dropdown

There are three ways of selecting options from the dropdown-

1. selectByIndex – To select an option based on its index, beginning with 0.

   dropdown.selectByIndex(3);
   

2. selectByValue – To select an option based on its ‘value’ attribute.

   dropdown.selectByValue("Database");
   

3. selectByVisibleText – To select an option based on the text over the option.

   dropdown.selectByVisibleText("Database Testing");
   

Different utility methods in the Select class

• deselectAll() – To deselect all the selected options.
• deselectByIndex(int index) – To deselect the option based on its index.
• deselectByValue(String valueAttribute) – To deselect the option its ‘value’ attribute.
• deselectByVisibleText(String text) – To deselect the option based on the text over the option.
• getOptions() – To return list of all the options(List<WebElement>).
• getAllSelectedOptions() – To return the list of all the selected options(List<WebElement>).
• getFirstSelectedOption() – To return the selected option or the first selected option in case of dropdowns allowing multi-select.
• isMultiple() – To return a boolean value, checking if the dropdown allows multiple option select or not.