[Feature] extend Locator API with helper methods

As an example, I would like to introduce findByRole method that is equivalent to:

page.locator(
  `role=${role}[name="${name}"]`
)

I have figured out how to add this to Page object,

https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/issues/1604#issuecomment-1224950604

This allows me to write code like:

await page.findByRole('link', 'Services').click();

However, this breaks when chaining Locator instances, e.g.

await page
  .locator('role=dialog')
-  .locator('role=link[name="Create A Service"]')
+  .findByRole('link', 'Create A Service')
  .click();

The above is throwing an error since .locator('role=dialog') is returning an instance of a Locator that is not aware of findByRole.

[yury-s]

@gajus do you have a particular API in mind that Playwright could expose to support such extensibility?

You can already wrap a locator in another object with the extended interface similar to how you did with the page (you’d need to override Page.locator to return a wrapper instead of the original locator). You’d also need to proxy all locator methods and also ensure that the methods that return a new instance of Locator also return wrapped objects. It will not work with the playwright API methods that accept Locator as argument (e…g. has option) so they’d have to be unwrapped before being passed into the method.

Related issue https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/issues/13517

[pavelfeldman]

Closing since we’ve introduced typed locators like getByRole.