Check broken links on a Page using Selenium

In order to find and check broken links on a Page using Selenium we can do next steps:

1. Find all links using findElements() method.

2. Check each link response using java.net.HttpURLConnection class. (if page return 404 code - link is broken)

All these steps realized and described below:


[code lang="java"]
@Test
public void saveAllLinks(){
FirefoxDriver firefoxDriver = new FirefoxDriver();

// checking links on "http://docs.seleniumhq.org/download"
firefoxDriver.navigate().to("http://docs.seleniumhq.org/download");

// The "A" tag is a hyperlink tag need to find all these tags on page
List linksList = firefoxDriver.findElements(By.tagName("a"));
for(WebElement linkElement: linksList){
String link =linkElement.getAttribute("href");
if(link!=null){
if(!isLink(link)){
continue;
}
verifyLinkActive(link);
}
}
firefoxDriver.quit();
}

/**
* Methods verify some specific link attributes
* It can be used for find particular type links.
* @param link - link(URL)
* @return - true/false
*/
public boolean isLink(String link){
return link.contains("http://") && !link.contains("mailto");
}

public void verifyLinkActive(String linkUrl){
try {
URL url = new URL(linkUrl);
HttpURLConnection httpURLConnect=(HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
httpURLConnect.setConnectTimeout(3000);
httpURLConnect.connect();
if(httpURLConnect.getResponseCode()==HttpURLConnection.HTTP_NOT_FOUND){
System.out.println(linkUrl+" - "+httpURLConnect.getResponseMessage()
+ " - "+ HttpURLConnection.HTTP_NOT_FOUND);
}
} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
[/code]

We used isList() method to add some tag attributes verification, it's possible to add some
search rules, for checkin specific links on a page
For example add link.endsWith(".de") for verifiyng only link on German pages

Method  verifyLinkActive() creates URL object using link, then open connection and cast it to HttpURLConnection.
After connect we recive response code of the page and if it equals to HttpURLConnection.HTTP_NOT_FOUND (404 code)
we print out our broken link.

Full statistic about java, ryby, php, python development trends you can find on www.devtrends.net

The output of this test will give you somethis like:

[TestNG] Running:
 C:\Documents and Settings\User\.IdeaIC12\system\temp-testng-customsuite.xml
http://www.gorillalogic.com/forums/flexmonkium - Not Found - 404
===============================================
 Custom suite
 Total tests run: 1, Failures: 0, Skips: 0
 ===============================================