Namespace of XHTML elements changes after they are rerendere

[vlad2009]

We are using Richfaces in our application and test its UI with Selenium. Many test assertions are performed with XPath. The problem is that we have to use different XPath expressions before and after the Ajax call, because the elements reloaded by the Ajax call apper in an "x" namespace. Before the call they could be only found without specifiing any namespace.

The issue can be observed on the Richfaces Live Demo. Go to the Data Iteration / Data Grid Demo.
I am using XPath Checker Firefox plugin to get the XPath of an element.
The XPath to the price value of the first car: id('j_id355:j_id356:0:j_id357_body')/table/tbody/tr[1]/td[2]

Then I go to the next page and gets the XPath to the price value of the first car on that page:
id('j_id355:j_id356:9:j_id357_body')/x:table/x:tbody/x:tr[1]/x:td[2]

You can see that table and its child elements are now in x namespace.

Could you explain that behavior? Can it be alerted in some way?

[konstantin.mishin]

We also use Selenium in our tests. And XPath expressions work in they without problems.

[daniell]

We had the same problems here. It seems that this is an issue of the Firefox-XPath implementation.However, I've found a solution for us: don't allow Selenium to use the browsers XPath implementation by invoking
allowNativeXpath("false")

Hope, this solves your problem too.