Selenium Diff between POM page object model and page factory

Question

Seems like Page object model & page factory are doing similar things. 

IpmObjectInitializer initialize = new IpmObjectInitializer(driver.getWebDriver());

By using page factory: Initialize elements in BatchCreationPageFactory class

batchCreationPageFactory = initialize.getBatchCreationPageFactoryObj();

Answer 1

Page Object Model in Selenium is a design pattern to create an Object Repository for web UI elements.
However, Page Factory in Selenium is a built-in class for maintaining object repository. For that, we can import the package: Page Factory.

public class LogInPage
{
    private WebElement usrnm;
    private WebElement pwd;

    public LogInPage() {
    }

    public void locateElements() {
        usrnm = driver.findElement(By.id("userName"));
        pwd = driver.findElement(By.id("password"));
    }

    public void doLogIn() {
        usrnm.sendKeys("qwe");
        pwd.sendKeys("123");
    }
}

With Page Factory, initElement() statement can be used for easily looking up elements in page class.
Page Factory allows storing of page elements in cache memory using @CacheLookup annotation
So, which ever methods we have defined in a diff class, those can be imported by using the page factory library.

public class LogInPage
{
    @FindBy(id="userName")
    private WebElement usrnm;

    @FindBy(id="password")
    private WebElement pwd;

    public LogInPage() {
        PageFactory.initElements(driver, this); // initialize the members like driver.findElement()
    }

    public void doLogIn() {
        usrnm.sendKeys("qwe");
        pwd.sendKeys("123");
    }
}

Answer 2

Hi,

In POM (Page Object Model) you create new class for every new page/URL and put all your element identification methods in it.

Eg.

If you navigate to my Github - OrangeHRM automation sample project, you will notice that I have two .java files there. Dashboard and Login. So whatever element I identify on Login page, I put in Login.java and whatever elements I identify on Dashboard, I put it in Dashboard.java. This is really helpful in terms of maintenance and usability. So, if I want to work with any element present on Dashboard, I just have to say Dashboard.element. If case of change of element, I just have to change it at one place.

Page Factory is annotation inside selenium which you give it to class. So, when you define any class as page factory, all your elements inside the class will get loaded while any of element in the class is called. This is really a bad practice if you have 100s elements inside a class and you just have to make use of only one.

So, I would suggest you to go with POM. I do not have C# example, but I have similar one in Java which I have already shared.