java - In Selenium how do I find the "Current" object

Question

I would like for Selenium to navigate a menu via arrow keys--Starting with clicking the top menu item then pressing "DOWN", "DOWN", ...

The problem is that you have to always supply a specific element to send the "DOWN" to.

Is there any way to get the current element?

I tried:

by.xpath(".")

but it said that the expression was unrecognized or didn't return a proper object.

I expect I'm jsut missing some stupid trick.

Answer 1

In Selenium 2.0, if you are using WebDriver to drive the tests in the browser, you can use the WebDriver.TargetLocator class to get the element in focus, in a window/frame:

WebDriver driver = ... // initialize the driver
WebElement currentElement = driver.switchTo().activeElement();

If no element is in focus, the active element would turn out to be the body of the document being displayed, which might be the case when you launch a new page, for instance. When you invoke methods like click, sendKeys etc. you'll find the WebElement returned by the above invocation will always represent the element in focus.

This was tested using FirefoxDriver, and I would suspect that the same would be true of other drivers, except for the HtmlUnitDriver and similar drivers that do not use a full-fledged browser under the hood.