How to Select Value from Dropdown in Selenium

What is the Select Class in Selenium?

The Select class in Selenium is a helper class from the org.openqa.selenium.support.ui package that lets WebDriver interact with HTML <select> elements. It exposes methods to select and deselect options by visible text, value, or index, and to detect whether a drop-down accepts multiple selections.

Because Select is a regular Java class, you create an instance with the new keyword and pass the WebElement that points to the <select> tag on the page.

How to Select Dropdown in Selenium

Before handling a drop-down in Selenium, two steps are required:

1. Import the package org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.Select.
2. Instantiate the drop-down as a Select object in Selenium WebDriver.

As an example, open the Mercury Tours’ Registration page (https://demo.guru99.com/test/newtours/register.php) and locate the “Country” drop-down.

Step 1) Import the Select package.

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

Step 2) Declare the drop-down element as an instance of the Select class. In the example below, the instance is named drpCountry.

Select drpCountry = new Select(driver.findElement(By.name("country")));

Step 3) Start controlling the drop-down. Use any Select method to pick an option. The sample below selects “ANTARCTICA”:

drpCountry.selectByVisibleText("ANTARCTICA");

Select Methods in Selenium

The Select class provides several methods to interact with drop-down options. The five most common are described below.

1) selectByVisibleText() and deselectByVisibleText()

• Selects or deselects the option whose displayed text matches the parameter.
• Parameter: the exact text displayed for the option.

Example:

drpCountry.selectByVisibleText("ANTARCTICA");

2) selectByValue() and deselectByValue()

• Selects or deselects the option whose value attribute matches the parameter.
• Note that the displayed text and the value attribute are often different, as shown below.
• Parameter: the option’s value attribute.

Example:

drpCountry.selectByValue("234");

3) selectByIndex() and deselectByIndex()

• Selects or deselects the option at the given index. Indexes are zero-based.
• Parameter: the integer index of the option.

Example:

drpCountry.selectByIndex(0);

4) isMultiple()

• Returns TRUE if the drop-down allows multiple selections at the same time, otherwise FALSE.
• Parameter: none.

Example:

if (drpCountry.isMultiple()) {
    // do something here
}

5) deselectAll()

• Clears every selected option. Only valid on multi-select drop-downs.
• Parameter: none.

Example:

drpCountry.deselectAll();

Complete Code of Select Methods in Selenium

The following Java program demonstrates the Select class on both a single-select and a multi-select drop-down.

package newpackage;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.Select;
import org.openqa.selenium.By;

public class accessDropDown {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "C:\\geckodriver.exe");
        String baseURL = "https://demo.guru99.com/test/newtours/register.php";
        WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
        driver.get(baseURL);

        // Single-select drop-down
        Select drpCountry = new Select(driver.findElement(By.name("country")));
        drpCountry.selectByVisibleText("ANTARCTICA");

        // Multi-select drop-down
        driver.get("http://jsbin.com/osebed/2");
        Select fruits = new Select(driver.findElement(By.id("fruits")));
        fruits.selectByVisibleText("Banana");
        fruits.selectByIndex(1);
    }
}

Selecting Items in a Multiple SELECT element

The selectByVisibleText() method also works on multi-select drop-downs. As an example, use https://jsbin.com/osebed/2 as the base URL. It exposes a drop-down that accepts multiple selections at once.

The snippet below selects the first two options using selectByVisibleText():

Method Reference Table

This table summarises every Select-class method covered above for quick lookup.

Command	Description
selectByVisibleText() / deselectByVisibleText()	Selects or deselects an option by its displayed text.
selectByValue() / deselectByValue()	Selects or deselects an option by its value attribute.
selectByIndex() / deselectByIndex()	Selects or deselects an option by its zero-based index.
isMultiple()	Returns TRUE if the drop-down allows multiple selections, otherwise FALSE.
deselectAll()	Deselects all previously selected options on a multi-select drop-down.

To control drop-down boxes, import the org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.Select package first, then create a Select instance and call any of the methods above.

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