Is there a way to perform a mouseover (hover over an element) using Selenium and Python bindings?

Question

Reading here, there apparently used to be a RenderedWebElement class with a hover method. It, however, was exclusively made for Java (I have searched the Python bindings documentation to no avail) and has since been deprecated for Java.

A hover can't be performed using action_chains nor by using a WebElement object either.

Any ideas as to how to do this for Python? The RenderedWebElement doesn't help too much.

I am using: Python 2.7, Windows Vista, Selenium 2, Python Bindings

EDIT: There is a method mouse_over for a selenium.selenium.selenium object but I cannot figure a way to create an instance without having the stand-alone server running already.

EDIT Please go through the comments of the reply marked as the answer just in-case you have misconceptions as I did!

Answer 1

Using ActionChains class in Selenium WebDriver, we can do this step in the same manner as we do manually.

 Step 1:

 Import webdriver module

from selenium import webdriver

ActionChains implementation is available in the below package.

from selenium.webdriver.common.action_chains import ActionChains

Step 2:

Open Firefox browser and load URL.

driver = webdriver.Firefox(executable_path="");

driver.get("https://UrlToOpen");

Step 3:

Create ActionChains object by passing driver object

action = ActionChains(driver);

Step 4:

Find the first level menu object in page and move cursor on this object using the method ‘move_to_element()’.

Method perform() is used to execute the actions that we have built on action object. Do the same for all objects.

firstLevelMenu = driver.find_element_by_id("menu")

action.move_to_element(firstLevelMenu).perform();

secondLevelMenu = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//a[contains(text(),'menu1')]");

action.move_to_element(secondLevelMenu).perform();

 

Step 5:

Click on the required menu item using method click()

 secondLevelMenu.click();

The final block of code:

 from selenium import webdriver

from selenium.webdriver.common.action_chains import ActionChains

driver = webdriver.Firefox(executable_path="");

driver.get("https://UrlToOpen");

action = ActionChains(driver);

firstLevelMenu = driver.find_element_by_id("menu")

action.move_to_element(firstLevelMenu).perform();

secondLevelMenu = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//a[contains(text(),'menu1')]");

secondLevelMenu.click();

Java code for the same operation:

package com.allseleniumblog.sample;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;

import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;

import org.openqa.selenium.interactions.Actions;

import org.openqa.selenium.remote.DesiredCapabilities;

 

public class MouseHover {

public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {

System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "");

DesiredCapabilities desiredCapabilities = DesiredCapabilities.firefox();

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(desiredCapabilities);

driver.get("https://UrlToOpen");

Actions action = new Actions(driver);

action.moveToElement(driver.findElement(By.id("menu"))).perform();

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//a[contains(text(),'menu1')]")).click();

}

}

If you are interested to learn Selenium on a much deeper level and want to become a professional in the testing domain, check out Intellipaat’s automation testing certification!