receiving ElementNotVisibleException when element should be visible to webdriver

2
votes

I am attempting to have selenium click on links, which are within li elements. This is happening inside a while loop. The clicks are working until I reach an li which is below the level of the Firefox window. If I manually scroll down in the Firefox webdriver window before selenium attempts the click, the click will work without error.

Here is the java code I'm using for the click. Menu_item_module is an int which increases by 1 each time the loop runs to move down the list. The webelement below references the li element.

driver.findElement(By.id("digitalVellum_dijit_MenuListItem_" + menu_item_module)).click();

Here is a code snippet containing one of the li elements from the page in question.

<li id="digitalVellum_dijit_MenuListItem_11" class="dijitLayoutContainer dijitContainer menuListItem level1 item-22 closed dijitLayoutContainer-child dijitLayoutContainer-dijitLayoutContainer" data-dojo-attach-event="onclick:click" data-dojo-attach-point="containerNode" widgetid="digitalVellum_dijit_MenuListItem_11">
<a href="#" data-dojo-attach-point="_link" tabindex="0">
<span class="expander" data-dojo-attach-event="onclick:_toggleState"></span>
<span class="label">Overview</span>
<div class="clearoutfloats"> </div>
</a>
<ul id="digitalVellum_dijit_MenuList_2" class="mainMenu dijitLayoutContainer dijitContainer dijitLayoutContainer-child dijitLayoutContainer-dijitLayoutContainer" data-dojo-attach-point="containerNode" widgetid="digitalVellum_dijit_MenuList_2">
</li>

I have tried to have selenium scroll by using the following code.

JavascriptExecutor jsx = (JavascriptExecutor)driver;
jsx.executeScript("window.scrollBy(0,100)", "");

This appears to have no effect. I think that may be because the scroll area is a frame, not the entire page. Regardless, I didn't think I should need to scroll at all. I thought webdriver will scroll automatically when necessary to select an element.

Any help or insight would be much appreciated.

Thanks, Steve Archibald

2
javaseleniumwebdriverselenium-webdriver
If the element is in a frame, you'll need to use driver.switchTo().frame("frameIdentifier") before you'll be able to access elements in that frame. – Richard
Might be helpful to maximise browser window first using driver.manage().window.maximize(); and then try the click. – Faiz
As @Faiz mentioned, maximize the page before clicking the links. I had a very similar issue, where the driver will automatically scroll down to the link, but won't click it. Because my page was not maximized due to which there was a horizontal scroll bar. Every time when the browser scrolled down to the link, it was trying to click on the link but was actually clicking on the horizontal scroll bar. – LINGS

2 Answers

3
votes

Even if the element isn't in view(hidden), you can execute javascript on it:

JavascriptExecutor jsx = (JavascriptExecutor)driver;
jsx.executeScript("arguments[0].click();", element);

where element is the element you want to click on.

0
votes

I think you need to wait for elements before you click especially when you are doing it in a loop. Like others suggested, also try maximizing the window. Probably that will help WebDriver find the co-ordinates of the WebElement accurately, however I am not 100% sure. But I believe that you need WebDriverWait. Give this a try,

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 300/*seconds*/);
driver.manage().window().maximize();
driver.get("http://www.bbc.com/");
for (int menu_item_module = 0; menu_item_module < 10; menu_item_module++) {
    WebElement element = wait.until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By
                        .id("digitalVellum_dijit_MenuListItem_"
                                +menu_item_module)));
            element.click();
}