Compare database results to html table - Selenium Webdriver - Java

It is rather difficult to understand what is generating the html you provided, but if you have full control over the generation of each data row, you can assign an ID to each element. This is especially helpful when you are creating Jasper reports, which turn out to be an html table.

Let's say your table row looks like this:

<tr id="result_1" class="ng-scope" ng-repeat="item in PaymentHistoryCtrl.paymentHistoryArray | orderBy: 'date' track by $index ">
    <td id="result_1_date" class="ng-binding" ng-bind="item.date | date:'longDate'">February 12, 2016</td>
    <td id="result_1_policyNum" class="ng-binding" ng-bind="item.policyNumber">BTB1716401</td>
    <td id="result_1_total" class="ng-binding" ng-bind="item.total | currency">$3,000.00</td>
    <td id="result_1_refNum" class="ng-binding" ng-bind="item.referenceNumber">3***8431</td>
</tr>

What you can do then, is make a simple call to the selenium webDriver to get the text of an element.

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("result_1_total"))

If this is not the case, or if you do not care about the individual <td> elements, aside from the fact that they only exist on the page, you can simply loop through them.

//find the table on the page
WebElement tblEle = driver.findElement(By.id("myTable"))
List<WebElement> tblElements = tblEle.findElements(By.Xpath("/tbody/tr/"));
for (WebElement tblElementRow : tblElements) {
    List<WebElement> allTds = tblElementRow.findElement(By.xpath("td"))
    // do somthing with the list of allTds
}

Also, if I were you, instead of doing an stmt.executeUpdate(), I would do a stmt.executeQuery, which returns a resultset. This way, you can loop through the results, and add them to the array. When the array is filled, you can add simple mechanisms to it, to relate it to the table you generated.

Ex:

List<MyObject> objs = new ArrayList<>();
ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery("Select * from Table");
while (rs.next()) {
    // construct obj from rs
    objs.add(myCreatedObj);
}

MyObject findFromObjs(final String id) {
    for (MyObject cool : objs) {
        if (cool.getId().equals(id)) return cool
    }
}

then, when you do a call this function:

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id(findFromObjs("myFirstRs")))

Again, this all depends on how much power, granularity, and control you have. That will determine how you can approach this problem. When dealing with technologies that do not make absurd xpaths, sometimes, it is easier to hook onto the Id's. On the contrary, if you cannot assign IDs, you can also use xpath, but it might be a bit more difficult to use.

Lastly, a simple way to check your xpath (if that is what you plan on using) is to run it in console in Firefox. Something like this would be a good start:

$x("//tbody/tr/td[contains(text(), 'news')]")