Find and Click on each link on a web page using C# and Selenium

Question

i m trying to go through a list of ahref links in a web page and click on each link at a time. i managed to list all the links and display them using the GetAttribute method, but i m struggling to click on each link. Any advise please or similar example in C# with using selenium would be appreciated?

The reason i need to do this is to try and check that all the links can be clicked and don't return a page not found error

Thank in advance

List<IWebElement> item = new List<IWebElement>(); foreach (IWebElement item in OpenPageSteps.driver1.FindElements(By.TagName("a"))) { if (item.Displayed) { Console.WriteLine(item.GetAttribute("href")); } }` 

Answer 1

Your objective is to check whether the link is working fine and it does not return page not found error. One simple way without selenium is we can use WebRequest and WebResponse classes in .NET and C# to call a link and read its content.

public void callurl(string url) { WebRequest request = HttpWebRequest.Create(url); WebResponse response = request.GetResponse(); StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()); string urlText = reader.ReadToEnd(); // it takes the response from your url. now you can use as your need Response.Write(urlText.ToString()); } 

Call this function inside the loop and check whether it's return the page content or not.

Answer 2

Selenium is not the best tool to check the links for 404 error. You can gather links with Selenium, but then just use HttpClient to check them. It will be much more efficient.

var client = new HttpClient(); try { var response = await client.GetAsync(url); if (response.IsSuccessStatusCode) { // normal link } else { // Something wrong with link here (500 etc) } } catch (Exception e) { // .. Network related issues (site does not exist etc.) }