The By.name() method

As seen earlier, every element on a web page has many attributes. Name is one of them. For instance, the HTML code for the Search box is:

<input id="search" type="search" name="q" value="" class="input-text required-entry" maxlength="128" placeholder="Search entire store here..." autocomplete="off">

Here, name is one of the many attributes of the search box, and its value is q. If we want to identify this search box and set a value in it in your test script, the code will look as follows:

@Test
public void searchProduct() {
    // find search box and enter search string
    WebElement searchBox = driver.findElement(By.name("q"));
    searchBox.sendKeys("Phones");
    searchBox.submit();
    assertThat(driver.getTitle())
            .isEqualTo("Search results for: 'Phones'");
}

If you observe line four, the locating mechanism used here is By.name and the name is q. So, where did we get this name from? As discussed in the previous section, it is the browser developer tools that helped us get the name of the button. Launch Developer tools and use the inspect elements widget to get the attributes of an element.