Selenium WebDriver and DropDown Boxes

Question

If I want to select an option of a dropdown box, there are several ways to do that. I always used:

driver.findElement(By.id("selection")).sendKeys("Germany");

But that didn't work every time. Sometimes another option was selected. So I googled a little bit and found this piece of code which works every time:

WebElement select = driver.findElement(By.id("selection"));

    List<WebElement> options = select.findElements(By.tagName("option"));

    for (WebElement option : options) {

        if("Germany".equals(option.getText()))

            option.click();

    }

But that works really really slow. If I have a long list with many items in it, it really takes too much time. So my question is, is there a solution which works every time and is fast?

Answer 1

This chunk of code should do the magic: 

import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.Select;

Select droplist = new Select(driver.findElement(By.Id("selection")));   

droplist.selectByVisibleText("Germany");