What is the difference between Action and Actions in Selenium?

In Selenium, Action and Actions are two different classes that serve distinct purposes in handling user interactions. Here's a breakdown of their differences:

1. Action Class

• Purpose: Represents a single user interaction, such as a click, key press, or mouse movement.
  
• Usage: Used internally by Selenium to model individual actions.
  
• Key Point: You typically don’t interact directly with the Action class when writing Selenium scripts.
  
• Implementation: It’s part of the low-level implementation of complex interactions, created as a result of methods called on the Actions class.
  

2. Actions Class

• Purpose: Provides a higher-level API for building and performing complex user interactions like drag-and-drop, hover, and multiple sequential actions.
  
• Usage: This is the class you work with in your Selenium scripts to define and execute a sequence of user interactions.
  

Key Methods:

• moveToElement()
  
• click()
  
• doubleClick()
  
• dragAndDrop()
  
• contextClick()
  
• sendKeys()
  

Chaining: You can chain multiple actions together to perform complex sequences.

Execution: The sequence is executed when you call .perform().

Example: Using Actions to Perform Interactions

Here’s a practical example demonstrating how Actions works:

import org.openqa.selenium.By;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;

import org.openqa.selenium.interactions.Actions;

import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;

public class ActionsExample {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        // Set up WebDriver

        System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "path/to/chromedriver");

        WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

        try {

            // Navigate to the website

            driver.get("https://example.com");

            // Locate an element to perform actions on

            WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("targetElement"));

            // Create an Actions object

            Actions actions = new Actions(driver);

            // Build and perform a series of actions

            actions.moveToElement(element)   // Move the mouse to the element

                   .click()                  // Click on the element

                   .sendKeys("Text input")  // Send text input

                   .perform();               // Execute the actions

        } finally {

            driver.quit();

        }

    }

}

Conclusion

You primarily work with the Actions class in Selenium to build and execute complex interactions, while the Action class serves as the underlying representation of individual actions. Focus on using Actions for practical automation tasks.