Handling iframes in selenium

There are situations where web controls/elements reside inside an inline frame, the inline frame is another document or dom resides inside current HTML document.

iframe can be represented in html as tag name=”iframe”.

Elements inside an iframe can not be accessed as normal selenium statement – driver.findelement(By...)

need to use,

driver.switchTo().frame(...);

In selenium, how we can identify if web element[s] is/are inside an <iframe …=””> </iframe> ???
Right click on an web element, check if the context menu has any one of the following options –

If you get the options like above screenshot, then there are ways we can identify the web elements-

Individual iFrames

driver.switchTo().frame(int x); //by index, if  one or more frames present
driver.switchTo().frame(String frameName); //identify the iframe id or name attribute
driver.switchTo().frame(WebElement element); //locate the iframe as webElement and pass the webElement.

Nested iFrames

If there are nested iframes, then we can use
driver.switchTo().frame(ParentFrame).switchTo().frame(ChildFrame);

Out of iFrames

Once complete the action on the iframe elements, if we want to come out of the frame, then do
driver.switchTo().defaultContent(); //to come out of a frame for normal run

Code implementation

We will try to access the text “I am inside frame” text in a normal way (though it’s inside an iframe)

public class Iframes {

static WebDriver driver;

public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
    System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "c:\\Grid\\chromedriver.exe");
    driver = new ChromeDriver();
    driver.manage().window().maximize();
    driver.get("https://skpatro.github.io/demo/iframes/");

    String frametext = driver.findElement(By.id("frametext")).getText();
    System.out.println(frametext);
    Thread.sleep(5000);
    driver.quit();
}
}

OutPut

Exception in thread "main" org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchElementException: Unable to locate element: 

Now let’s try to access the iframe elements by using driver.switchTo().Frame…

If you inspect the iFrame, we can use id=”Frame1″ or name=”Framename1″

so we can use either of this

driver.switchTo().frame("Frame1"); //frame id

or

driver.switchTo().frame("Framename1"); //frame name

public class Iframes {
	static WebDriver driver;
	public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
		System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "c:\\Grid\\chromedriver.exe");
		driver = new ChromeDriver();
		driver.manage().window().maximize();
		driver.get("https://skpatro.github.io/demo/iframes/");
				
		driver.switchTo().frame("Frame1");
		String frametext = driver.findElement(By.id("frametext")).getText();
		System.out.println(frametext);
		Thread.sleep(5000);
		
		driver.switchTo().defaultContent();
		driver.findElement(By.linkText("Pavilion")).click();
		Thread.sleep(2000);
		driver.quit();
	}
}

even we can use,

driver.switchTo().frame("0"); //index wise, switch to 1st iframe

Another way we can achieve switching to iframe by identifying the iframe as webElement –

WebElement firstFrame = driver.findElement(By.id("Frame1"));
driver.switchTo().frame(firstFrame); //identify the frame as webelement and pass it as argument

Hope this helps!