How do I test which element has the focus in Selenium RC?

Question

How do I test which element has the focus in Selenium RC?

Answer 1

None of the other answers worked for me, for various reasons when I had the same issue. I ended up doing the following (with the Selenium 2.0 WebDriver, in Java).

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
String elScript = "return document.activeElement;";

// Note that the executeScript call returns a WebElement, 
// so you can do quite a lot with the result.
WebElement focuseedEl  = (WebElement) ((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript(elScript);

The comment clarifies a point of confusion I had: executeScript returns different things based on what you tell it to execute, which could be quite tricky.

Answer 2

I couldn't get the :focus pseudoclass idea to work, not sure why - targeting css=#search_input input.text matched, but css=#search_input input.text:focus didn't? But here is what worked for me:

self.assertEquals(self.se.get_element_index('dom=document.activeElement'),
     self.se.get_element_index('//input[@id="search-query"]'))

This is using the Python Selenium API, so the get_element_index() calls are wrappers around the core Selenium command list. Adapt this to your environment. It's evaluating the element index of the document's focused element (gotten with a Javascript DOM locator) and the element index of the element you want to test for focus (gotten with an XPath locator.) Also see this question.

Answer 3

You can use CSS selectors when providing an element locator to Selenium: http://release.seleniumhq.org/selenium-core/1.0/reference.html#locators

Therefore, you can use the :focus CSS pseudo-class on your selector to only match if the element is focused.

Combine that with a verifyElementPresent action and a target of something like the following: css=.yourclassname:focus. Replace yourclassname with your CSS class name, of course, or use one of the other CSS selectors; the important bit is the :focus at the end.

Note that this will almost certainly not work in the Selenium IDE Firefox plugin. I imagine that is because this plugin will have focus instead. I couldn't get it to work in the IDE (test always failed), but it worked fine once I exported it and ran it as a Java test.

HTH

Sam