Interface WebElement

java/src/org/openqa/selenium/WebElement.java:32–335

Represents an HTML element. Generally, all interesting operations to do with interacting with a page will be performed through this interface. All method calls will do a freshness check to ensure that the element reference is still valid. This essentially determines whether the element is still

 * future calls to this instance will fail.
 */
public interface WebElement extends SearchContext, TakesScreenshot {
  /**
   * Click this element. If this causes a new page to load, you should discard all references to
   * this element and any further operations performed on this element will throw a
   * StaleElementReferenceException.
   *
   * <p>Note that if click() is done by sending a native event (which is the default on most
   * browsers/platforms) then the method will _not_ wait for the next page to load and the caller
   * should verify that themselves.
   *
   * <p>There are some preconditions for an element to be clicked. The element must be visible, and
   * it must have a height and width greater than 0.
   *
   * <p>See <a href="https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/#element-click">W3C WebDriver specification</a>
   * for more details.
   *
   * @throws StaleElementReferenceException If the element no longer exists as initially defined
   */
  void click();

  /**
   * If this current element is a form, or an element within a form, then this will be submitted to
   * the remote server. If this causes the current page to change, then this method will block until
   * the new page is loaded.
   *
   * @throws NoSuchElementException If the given element is not within a form
   */
  void submit();

  /**
   * Use this method to simulate typing into an element, which may set its value.
   *
   * <p>See <a href="https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/#element-send-keys">W3C WebDriver
   * specification</a> for more details.
   *
   * @param keysToSend character sequence to send to the element
   * @throws IllegalArgumentException if keysToSend is null
   */
  void sendKeys(CharSequence... keysToSend);

  /**
   * If this element is a form entry element, this will reset its value.
   *
   * <p>See <a href="https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/#element-clear">W3C WebDriver specification</a>
   * and <a href="https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#concept-form-reset-control">HTML specification</a>
   * for more details.
   */
  void clear();

  /**
   * Get the tag name of this element. <b>Not</b> the value of the name attribute: will return
   * <code>"input"</code> for the element <code>&lt;input name="foo" /&gt;</code>.
   *
   * <p>See <a href="https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/#get-element-tag-name">W3C WebDriver
   * specification</a> for more details.
   *
   * @return The tag name of this element.
   */