Stale Element Reference error in Selenium - java

I am getting an error while running my selenium tests
Exception in thread "main"
org.openqa.selenium.StaleElementReferenceException: stale element
reference: element is not attached to the page document
(Session info: chrome=63.0.3239.84)
(Driver info: chromedriver=2.34.522932 (
4140ab217e1ca1bec0c4b4d1b148f3361eb3a03e),platform=Mac OS X 10.12.6
x86_64) (WARNING: The server did not provide any stacktrace
information)
Command duration or timeout: 0 milliseconds
For documentation on this error, please visit:
http://seleniumhq.org/exceptions/stale_element_reference.html
01T19:05:14.666Z'.
Here is the code
List<WebElement> category =
driver.findElements(By.className("a2s-skill-block"));
for(int i = 0;i<category.size();i++) {
category.get(i).click();
Thread.sleep(7000);
driver.navigate().back();
// WebElement skills1 = driver.findElement(By.id("iApps"));
//skills1.click();
Thread.sleep(15000);
}
I went through similar thread posts on this question and tried a lot of solutions mentioned by fellow members but somehow the wait and Expected COnditions don't seem to work.Any other direction of thought is really appreciated.
These are the options I tried
Increased the wait time through Thread.sleep() method
Introduced wait and Expected Conditions
WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 150);
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.
presenceOfAllElementsLocatedBy(By.className("text-heading")));


You should spend some time reading about and understanding what a StaleElementReferenceException is. It is important to understand what causes it and what to do to avoid it.
In this case, you are scraping the page and loading category with elements off of Page 1. You then click some link that takes you to page 2. At that point, all the references in category are stale but an exception isn't thrown yet because you haven't accessed any of the variables yet. You then use .back() to return to Page 1 and attempt to do something with category and get the exception.
To avoid this, you need to rescrape the elements into category on Page 1 after you use .back() from another page. One way is what I've written below. The page is scraped at the bottom of each loop.
List<WebElement> category = driver.findElements(By.className("a2s-skill-block"));
for (int i = 0; i < category.size(); i++)
{
category.get(i).click();
// sleeps are a bad practice, use WebDriverWait instead
driver.navigate().back();
driver.findElement(By.id("iApps")).click();
// sleeps are a bad practice, use WebDriverWait instead
category = driver.findElements(By.className("a2s-skill-block"));
}


You find out all category on the page before for loop. When you click something inside loop to enter another page, Actually the 'Stale Element Refrence' had been triggered, regrardless of you back to the last page finally.
Below conditions will trigger 'Stale Element Refrence'
Condition 1
Use the found element when you enter the page last time and you leave the page at least one time (even you back again).
You can think as when you enter a page Selenium will assign a reference to the page inside Selenium, Even you entered the same page, but Selenium can't know they are same so it will assign an new reference.
You can only use found element which page reference is same as current page you are on.
Condition 2
Stay on the page(not leave it), but your script triggered the HTML DOM Node of the found elements change/reattach/delete. for example some attribute of the DOM Node changed or the DOM Node removed and added back again desipte all atttibutes not change.
Thus any change/move on the DOM Node of found elements will trigger 'Stale Element Refrence'. You can think Condition 1 is just another way of change/move DOM Node.
To fix you issue, you should read out an attribute of all category which can be used to identify the category later in the loop.
Below code assume each category has unique text:
List<WebElement> category =
driver.findElements(By.className("a2s-skill-block"));
List<String> categoryTexts = new ArrayList<String>();
for(WebElement it: category) {
categoryTexts.add(it.getText());
}
for(int i = 0;i<category.size();i++) {
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[text()='"+categoryTexts.get(i)+"']")).click();
Thread.sleep(7000);
driver.navigate().back();
Thread.sleep(15000);

Related

element not interactable exception in selenium web automation

In the below code i cannot send password keys in the password field, i tried clicking the field, clearing the field and sending the keys. But now working in any of the method. But its working if i debug and test
public class TestMail {
protected static WebDriver driver;
protected static String result;
#BeforeClass
public static void setup() {
System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver","D:\\geckodriver.exe");
driver = new FirefoxDriver();
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(60, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
}
#Test
void Testcase1() {
driver.get("http://mail.google.com");
WebElement loginfield = driver.findElement(By.name("Email"));
if(loginfield.isDisplayed()){
loginfield.sendKeys("ragesh#gmail.in");
}
else{
WebElement newloginfield = driver.findElemnt(By.cssSelector("#identifierId"));
newloginfield.sendKeys("ragesh#gmail.in");
// System.out.println("This is new login");
}
driver.findElement(By.name("signIn")).click();
// driver.findElement(By.cssSelector(".RveJvd")).click();
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(15, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
// WebElement pwd = driver.findElement(By.name("Passwd"));
WebElement pwd = driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("#Passwd"));
pwd.click();
pwd.clear();
// pwd.sendKeys("123");
if(pwd.isEnabled()){
pwd.sendKeys("123");
}
else{
System.out.println("Not Enabled");
}

Try setting an implicit wait of maybe 10 seconds.
gmail.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
Or set an explicit wait. An explicit waits is code you define to wait for a certain condition to occur before proceeding further in the code. In your case, it is the visibility of the password input field. (Thanks to ainlolcat's comment)
WebDriver gmail= new ChromeDriver();
gmail.get("https://www.gmail.co.in");
gmail.findElement(By.id("Email")).sendKeys("abcd");
gmail.findElement(By.id("next")).click();
WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(gmail, 10);
WebElement element = wait.until(
ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.id("Passwd")));
gmail.findElement(By.id("Passwd")).sendKeys("xyz");
Explanation: The reason selenium can't find the element is because the id of the password input field is initially Passwd-hidden. After you click on the "Next" button, Google first verifies the email address entered and then shows the password input field (by changing the id from Passwd-hidden to Passwd). So, when the password field is still hidden (i.e. Google is still verifying the email id), your webdriver starts searching for the password input field with id Passwd which is still hidden. And hence, an exception is thrown.

"element not interactable" error can mean two things :
a. Element has not properly rendered:
Solution for this is just to use implicit /explicit wait
Implicit wait :
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(50, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
Explicit wait :
WebDriverWait wait=new WebDriverWait(driver, 20);
element1 = wait.until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By.className("fa-stack-1x")));
b. Element has rendered but it is not in the visible part of the screen:
Solution is just to scroll till the element. Based on the version of Selenium it can be handled in different ways but I will provide a solution that works in all versions :
JavascriptExecutor executor = (JavascriptExecutor) driver;
executor.executeScript("arguments[0].scrollIntoView(true);", element1);
Suppose all this fails then another way is to again make use of Javascript executor as following :
executor.executeScript("arguments[0].click();", element1);
If you still can't click , then it could again mean two things :
1. Iframe
Check the DOM to see if the element you are inspecting lives in any frame. If that is true then you would need to switch to this frame before attempting any operation.
driver.switchTo().frame("a077aa5e"); //switching the frame by ID
System.out.println("********We are switching to the iframe*******");
driver.findElement(By.xpath("html/body/a/img")).click();
2. New tab
If a new tab has opened up and the element exists on it then you again need to code something like below to switch to it before attempting operation.
String parent = driver.getWindowHandle();
driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("Continue")).click();
Set<String> s = driver.getWindowHandles();
// Now iterate using Iterator
Iterator<String> I1 = s.iterator();
while (I1.hasNext()) {
String child_window = I1.next();
if (!parent.equals(child_window)) {
driver.switchTo().window(child_window);
element1.click()
}

Please try selecting the password field like this.
WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 10);
WebElement passwordElement = wait.until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By.cssSelector("#Passwd")));
passwordElement.click();
passwordElement.clear();
passwordElement.sendKeys("123");

you may also try full xpath, I had a similar issue where I had to click on an element which has a property javascript onclick function. the full xpath method worked and no interactable exception was thrown.

In my case the element that generated the Exception was a button belonging to a form. I replaced
WebElement btnLogin = driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("button"));
btnLogin.click();
with
btnLogin.submit();
My environment was chromedriver windows 10

In my case, I'm using python-selenium.
I have two instructions. The second instruction wasn't able to execute.
I put a time.sleep(1) between two instructions and I'm done.
If you want you can change the sleep amount according to your need.

I had the same problem and then figured out the cause. I was trying to type in a span tag instead of an input tag. My XPath was written with a span tag, which was a wrong thing to do. I reviewed the Html for the element and found the problem. All I then did was to find the input tag which happens to be a child element. You can only type in an input field if your XPath is created with an input tagname

I'm going to hedge this answer with this: I know it's crap.. and there's got to be a better way. (See above answers) But I tried all the suggestions here and still got nill. Ended up chasing errors, ripping the code to bits. Then I tried this:
import keyboard
keyboard.press_and_release('tab')
keyboard.press_and_release('tab')
keyboard.press_and_release('tab') #repeat as needed
keyboard.press_and_release('space')
It's pretty insufferable and you've got to make sure that you don't lose focus otherwise you'll just be tabbing and spacing on the wrong thing.
My assumption on why the other methods didn't work for me is that I'm trying to click on something the developers didn't want a bot clicking on. So I'm not clicking on it!

I got this error because I was using a wrong CSS selector with the Selenium WebDriver Node.js function By.css().
You can check if your selector is correct by using it in the web console of your web browser (Ctrl+Shift+K shortcut), with the JavaScript function document.querySelectorAll().

If it's working in the debug, then wait must be the proper solution.
I will suggest to use the explicit wait, as given below:
WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(new ChromeDriver(), 5);
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.presenceOfElementLocated(By.cssSelector("#Passwd")));

I came across this error too. I thought it might have been because the field was not visible. I tried the scroll solution above and although the field became visible in the controlled browser session I still got the exception. The solution I am committing looks similar to below. It looks like the event can bubble to the contained input field and the end result is the Selected property becomes true.
The field appears in my page something like this.
<label>
<input name="generic" type="checkbox" ... >
<label>
The generic working code looks more or less like this:
var checkbox = driver.FindElement(By.Name("generic"), mustBeVisible: false);
checkbox.Selected.Should().BeFalse();
var label = checkbox.FindElement(By.XPath(".."));
label.Click();
checkbox.Selected.Should().BeTrue();
You'll need to translate this to your specific language. I'm using C# and FluentAssertions. This solution worked for me with Chrome 94 and Selenium 3.141.0.

I had to hover over the element first for the sub-elements to appear. I didn't take that into account at first.
WebElement boardMenu = this.driver.findElement(By.linkText(boardTitle));
Actions action = new Actions(this.driver);
action.moveToElement(boardMenu).perform();
Another tip is to check that you are having one element of that DOM. Try using Ctrl+F when inspecting the web page and check your xpath there; it should return one element if you are going with the findElement method.

Element not visible Selenium

I am trying to crawl data from agoda.com. I want to filter all the reviews by language, english. When I do a count based on the selector, I get 1, however, when I try to click or wait for the element to be visible, the program throws the element not visible exception after the timeout.
This is the code I am trying so far
String url = "https://www.agoda.com/en-sg/resorts-world-sentosa-hard-rock-hotel/hotel/singapore-sg.html";
driver.get(url);
try {
for (WebElement element: driver.findElements(By.xpath("//*[starts-with(#id, 'language-')]"))) {
if (element.getTagName().equalsIgnoreCase("input")) {
if (element.findElement(By.xpath("..")).getText().equalsIgnoreCase("english")) {
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOf(element));
element.click();
break;
}
}
}
}catch(Exception e){
System.out.println(e.getMessage());
}
Where am I going wrong?

Please try to use following code:
// To find and click on required check-box
WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div[input[starts-with(#id, 'language-')]/span[text()='English']]"));
Actions actions = new Actions(driver);
actions.moveToElement(element);
actions.click();
actions.perform();

It's not possible to be sure from here what's wrong, especially without the actual copy-paste from the exception, but one cause for that is an element present but not currently visible. It might be suppressed or out of the viewport. If you open the page in a browser such as Chrome that supports a "developer" mode, you can view the element attributes to confirm or refute that.
Side notes:
• Post complete information about your problem with your question. What is the exact exception, its message, and a few lines of the stack trace?
• If possible, post the details of the web element from your "developer" view of it.
• Don't catch Exception, catch specific exceptions.
• Copy and paste code fragments rather than retyping them. If your actual code called printlkn then you have deeper problems.

Getting stale element exception while iterating over element loop

Build an iterator to iterate through a WebElement List:
List<WebElement> rowElements = driver.findElements(By.tagName("tr"));
for (WebElement element : rowElements)
{
List<WebElement> elements = element.findElements(By.tagName("td"));
for (WebElement localElement : elements)
{
localElement.getText();// Next localElement is stale after select statement is run.**
if (!localElement.getText().equalsIgnoreCase(""))
{
Select newSelectElement = new Select(driver.findElement(By.tagName("select")));
newSelectElement.selectByValue("value to select");// This causes a page refresh through Ajax call.
final WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 30);
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.invisibilityOfElementLocated(By.id("ajaxStatusModalPanelContainer")));
}
} // inner "For" loop ends
}
So now the issue is:
If I try to perform any command on localElement, after the select action which generates ajax call. At this point after the click, the localElement is stale, and you cannot access it again, unless, you perform a whole new routine to locate it again using any of By call.
Is there any way to handle such condition and do something
like WebElement.refresh() to de-stale the current or next coming
element. I am using java as code language.

Yes, you have to fetch all the elements again after they go stale. Updating the SELECT is causing an update to the relevant elements so they go stale. You will then have to refetch them all.
If you will provide more details around your scenario and the relevant HTML, I may be able to help you rewrite your code to work properly.

Selenium class name not found from the example

I found this selenium automation code on stackoverflow.
I was trying to run the program. It gives an error:
Unable to locate element: {"method":"class name","selector":"gssb_e"}
I inspected some web elements on that page to see if I will find the class name gssb_e. But I did not find any. I want to modify or update the class name but I am not sure what webelement the example is trying access. can you please help.
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
// Go to the Google Suggest home page
driver.get("http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en");
// Enter the query string "Cheese"
WebElement query = driver.findElement(By.name("q"));
query.sendKeys("Cheese");
// Sleep until the div we want is visible or 5 seconds is over
long end = System.currentTimeMillis() + 5000;
while (System.currentTimeMillis() < end) {
WebElement resultsDiv = driver.findElement(By.className("gssb_e"));
// If results have been returned, the results are displayed in a drop down.
if (resultsDiv.isDisplayed()) {
break;
}
}

TL;DR: Use better location strategies and explicit waits.
I don't see an element with gssb_e class name when I do the same manually.
Instead, in this intentionally created "mess", I would try sticking to the more reliable things. For instance, if we are trying to wait until the results would appear, I would, for example, explicitly wait for the element with id="search" to become visible:
WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, timeOut);
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.id("search")));
In other words, comparing to the gssb_e class name that you were using, there are so many more reliable, more logical and simpler things on the Google Search Results page that can tell you the results are ready and visible.

Element not found in the cache - perhaps the page has changed since it was looked up Command duration or timeout: 9 milliseconds

I am new to Selenium WebDriver and using java for the same. On one of the test sites, i am encountering this error. The element is drop down box, and its is 4th Element I am trying to identify on this particular form. First three elements are successfully identified and can be operated, then this error occurs. I have tried Explicit, implicit waits, also tried finding the element again, but not working. Following is the code:
wd.manage().deleteAllCookies();
WebDriverWait wait5 = new WebDriverWait(wd, 5);
wait5.until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.xpath("//*[#id='cc_type']")));
WebElement CCType = wd.findElement(By.xpath("//*[#id='cc_type']"));
Select clickCCType = new Select(CCType);
clickRoomNos.selectByValue("AMEX");

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