How to Select a Dropdown in Selenium WebDriver using Java

In order to select a dropdown value with Selenium WebDriver you have to create a Select (in C# it’s called SelectElement) element and not use the default WebElements.

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

Use our previous post to locate elements with Selenium WebDriver.

Select dropdown = new Select(driver.findElement(By.id("identifier")));

Let’s consider the following dropdown element for our example:

<select id="mySelect">
<option value="option1">France</option>
<option value="option2">Italy</option>
<option value="option3">Spain</option>
</select>

FranceItalySpain

1. Identify the select HTML element:

WebElement mySelectElement = driver.findElement(By.id("mySelect"));
Select dropdown= new Select(mySelectElement);

or pass it directly to the Select element:

Select dropdown = new Select(driver.findElement(By.id("mySelect")));

2. To select an option you can do:

All select/deselect methods will throw NoSuchElementException if no matching option elements are found.
Select by Visible Text (select all options that display text matching the argument):

dropdown.selectByVisibleText("Italy");

or

Select by Index (select the option at the given index. This is done by examining the “index” attribute of an element, and not merely by counting):

dropdown.selectByIndex(2);

dropdown.selectByValue("option2");

dropdown.deselectAll();

dropdown.deselectByVisibleText("Italy");

dropdown.deselectByIndex(2);

dropdown.deselectByValue("option2");

WebElement mySelectElement = driver.findElement(By.id("mySelect"));
Select dropdown= new Select(mySelectElement);
dropdown.selectByVisibleText("Italy");

WebElement option = dropdown.getFirstSelectedOption();
System.out.println(option.getText()); //output "Italy"

WebElement mySelectElement = driver.findElement(By.id("mySelect"));
Select dropdown= new Select(mySelectElement);
List options = dropdown.getOptions();
for (WebElement option : options) {
System.out.println(option.getText()); //output "option1", "option2", "option3"
}

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