[🚀 Feature]: [py] A common interface/mixin for element location `find_element(...)` & `find_elements(...)`

[symonk]

Feature and motivation

There is some duplication throughout the following areas that are (largely) carrying out the same tasks:

grep -rE "def find_elements?\(" * 
selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py:    def find_element(self, by=By.ID, value=None) -> WebElement:
selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py:    def find_elements(self, by=By.ID, value=None) -> List[WebElement]:
selenium/webdriver/remote/webelement.py:    def find_element(self, by=By.ID, value=None):
selenium/webdriver/remote/webelement.py:    def find_elements(self, by=By.ID, value=None):
selenium/webdriver/remote/shadowroot.py:    def find_element(self, by: By = By.ID, value: str = None):
selenium/webdriver/remote/shadowroot.py:    def find_elements(self, by: By = By.ID, value: str = None):
selenium/webdriver/support/event_firing_webdriver.py:    def find_element(self, by=By.ID, value=None):
selenium/webdriver/support/event_firing_webdriver.py:    def find_elements(self, by=By.ID, value=None):
selenium/webdriver/support/event_firing_webdriver.py:    def find_element(self, by=By.ID, value=None):
selenium/webdriver/support/event_firing_webdriver.py:    def find_elements(self, by=By.ID, value=None):

Note: EventFiringWebDriver is just dynamically dispatching calls at runtime and implements nothing itself.

These areas can likely be simplified by exposing some sort of LocatesElementsMixin (or whatever is better named in line with other bindings; a mixin class is just an idea as it has some drawbacks too, but this issue is more just to figure out what would be a good approach to unifying it.

A few of the problems:

• Keeping backwards compatibility
• The actual webdriver Command dispatch varies throughout
• instance attributes vary in naming which makes a mixin class a little tougher and unclean

Curious on your thoughts to this? @AutomatedTester has a comment in ShadowRoot.py here; I assume it was also aiming to move towards something like this?

https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/blob/575b878db2efccdde95ea8d0bdf6b8db4bea1fa0/py/selenium/webdriver/remote/shadowroot.py#L26

Python is not java of course so we should keep that in mind and leverage duck typing etc where applicable.

[github-actions[bot]]

@symonk, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

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[AutomatedTester]

This part of the deprecation plan in my head for the find_element_* method to get us to this point and then we can move to either using Mixins here or have a pure object (like .NET/Java).

[symonk]

@titusfortner cleared the milestone here; don't think it's a good one, let's focus on clearing down what needs removed first, then we can look at consolidating the APIs

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue is stale because it has been open 280 days with no activity. Remove stale label or comment or this will be closed in 14 days.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue is stale because it has been open 280 days with no activity. Remove stale label or comment or this will be closed in 14 days.

[titusfortner]

@AutomatedTester were you thinking of having a SearchContext class that each of these methods can call? (because I know you don't like mix-ins)

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