Is there any reason get_parent or get_ siblings methods for a element does not exist?

[Songyu-Wang]

🚀 Feature Proposal

Adding a method to allow user to get the parent of a element
Adding a method to allow user to get the siblings of a element

Motivation

If I can find the children element of a element with calling find on that element, why cant I get the parent or siblings?
The implementation should be very simple and those two methods seems like common method ppl use everyday.

Example

Assuming:

<div "some_setting">
<div "some_other_setting"> text </div>
<div> otherstuff </div>
</div>

It would be easier if we can jump from inner div to outer div to check if setting are overwritten correctly

[cgoldberg]

Which client bindings are you referring to?

in the Python bindings (for example), WebElement already has a parent property... adding a get_parent method would be redundant (and unpythonic).

[Songyu-Wang]

@cgoldberg
Based on the docs: Internal reference to the WebDriver instance this element was found from.
parent property is only for internal reference which would not return what normal people expect it to return.
See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30439688/get-td-which-contains-specific-texts-and-then-find-its-parents-and-siblings as an example

[luke-hill]

Dependent on how you have located your element and what bindings you use depends on how this is done. Also note that for finding a parent of an element you would need to be using xpath locators only.

If you want a sibling selector use + in css locators i.e. div.thing + div.sibling and for a descendant use > in css locators - i.e. div.thing > div.child.

Either way, this feels like a package (py/gem/jar)'s responsibility as a layer ontop of selenium rather than selenium itself, and I know some of the bindings have removed things similar to this in the past because it's not really the responsibility of selenium

[okyrylenko]

you can use /.. xpath to navigate to a parent element

[Songyu-Wang]

@luke-hill @okyrylenko Thanks for the workaround. I know I can do them that way, but my problem is that the code is less readable unless I wrap it as helper functions.
But if this is already decided to not include in selenium. I guess I will close the issue then.