Selenium WebDriver can't find element by link text

13
votes

I'm trying to select an element that includes an anchor, but the text is buried in a paragraph inside of a div. Here's the HTML I'm working with:

<a class="item" ng-href="#/catalog/90d9650a36988e5d0136988f03ab000f/category/DATABASE_SERVERS/service/90cefc7a42b3d4df0142b52466810026" href="#/catalog/90d9650a36988e5d0136988f03ab000f/category/DATABASE_SERVERS/service/90cefc7a42b3d4df0142b52466810026">
<div class="col-lg-2 col-sm-3 col-xs-4 item-list-image">
<img ng-src="csa/images/library/Service_Design.png" src="csa/images/library/Service_Design.png">
</div>
<div class="col-lg-8 col-sm-9 col-xs-8">
<div class="col-xs-12">
    <p>
    <strong class="ng-binding">Smoke Sequential</strong>
    </p>

The code I'm using to try to snag it is targeting the "Smoke Sequential" text with:

driver.findElement(By.linkText(service)).click();

Where the variable 'service' holds "Smoke Sequential" in it. When I run it, I get the following error:

org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchElementException: Unable to locate element: {"method":"link text","selector":"Smoke Sequential"}

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

5
javahtmlseleniumselenium-webdriver

5 Answers

25
votes

The problem might be in the rest of the html, the part that you didn't post.

With this example (I just closed the open tags):

<a class="item" ng-href="#/catalog/90d9650a36988e5d0136988f03ab000f/category/DATABASE_SERVERS/service/90cefc7a42b3d4df0142b52466810026" href="#/catalog/90d9650a36988e5d0136988f03ab000f/category/DATABASE_SERVERS/service/90cefc7a42b3d4df0142b52466810026">
<div class="col-lg-2 col-sm-3 col-xs-4 item-list-image">
<img ng-src="csa/images/library/Service_Design.png" src="csa/images/library/Service_Design.png">
</div>
<div class="col-lg-8 col-sm-9 col-xs-8">
<div class="col-xs-12">
    <p>
    <strong class="ng-binding">Smoke Sequential</strong>
    </p>
    </div>
</div>
</a>

I was able to find the element without trouble with:

driver.findElement(By.linkText("Smoke Sequential")).click();

If there is more text inside the element, you could try a find by partial link text:

driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("Sequential")).click();
5
votes

Use xpath and text()

driver.findElement(By.Xpath("//strong[contains(text(),'" + service +"')]"));
0
votes

This doesn't seem to have <a> </a> tags so selenium might not be able to detect it as a link.

You may try and use

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[@class='ng-binding']")).click();

if this is the only element in that page with this class .

0
votes

A CSS selector approach could definitely work here. Try:

driver.findElement(By.CssSelector("a.item")).Click();

This will not work if there are other anchors before this one of the class item. You can better specify the exact element if you do something like "#my_table > a.item" where my_table is the id of a table that the anchor is a child of.

0
votes
find_elements_by_xpath("//*[@class='class name']")

is a great solution