Selenium cannot find element in main window

Question

I am attempting to download a file from a website using Selenium and Python 3. This requires pressing a confirmation button on an overlay window. The overlay window is not within an iFrame – the HTML is simply dynamically added when the overlay appears – but Selenium is not able to find the button by xPath, returning a NoSuchElementException. Am I missing anything that would cause Selenium not to be able to see the element as it appears in the page source? So far as I can tell, Selenium should be able to locate the button with no issue.

#Initialize Driver
driver = webdriver.Safari()

cmd = "osascript -e 'tell application "Safari" to set bounds of front window to {0, 22, 1500, 1022}'"
os.system(cmd)

#Call up seach link
driver.get(data_url)

wait_a = WebDriverWait(driver, 15)
element = wait_a.until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, "md-input-3")))

#Initialize and send login information (defined above)
username = driver.find_element_by_id("md-input-3")
password = driver.find_element_by_id("md-input-6")

username.send_keys(crunchbase_username)
password.send_keys(crunchbase_password)

#Click login button
password.send_keys(Keys.ENTER)

#Wait for results page to finish loading
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 15)
element = wait.until(EC.title_contains("Signals"))

time.sleep(2)

#Press Download Button
driver.find_element_by_xpath("//button[@aria-label='Export your results']").click()
time.sleep(2)

#Press csv button
driver.find_element_by_xpath("//button[@aria-label='Export to CSV']").click()
time.sleep(2)

#Confirm downlaod
driver.find_element_by_xpath("//*[@id='cdk-overlay-36']/md-dialog-container/confirmation-dialog/dialog-layout/div/md-dialog-actions/div/button[2]").click()

#Close driver
#driver.close()

The page source is overly complicated and highly stylized so I will not include it here, but a screenshot of the relevant section of the code in my browser’s web inspector is below. The element which I’m trying to click is highlighted in blue.

Web Inspector Screenshot

I appreciate any help with this.

Asked By: Henry Desai

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Source

Answer 1

Before clicking on the element, execute the following lines:

    WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.xpath(" path_of_your_module "));
((JavaScriptExecutor) driver). executeScript("argument[0].scrollIntoView(true);", element);

Answered By: NAIMISH KUNWAR

Answer 2

It is hard to tell without having access to the page under question and being able to see what’s going. Few general points:

Try css selectors instead of xpath. They are more robust, easier to work with and fast.
Acvoid using dynamically generated IDs. In your screenshot I can’t even see an id that appears in your code.
When you have more than one element of the same kind (like buttons in your case) try getting all webelements under a certain parent and test all of them for having an attribute value that you are looking for.

For example:

elemItems = driver.find_elements_by_css_selector(menuItemSelector)

for element in elements:
    if element.text == "export":
        elemItems[1].click()

Here, you find all the elements of a certain type (buttons for example) and select one that has “export” text in it.

Answered By: Eugene S

Answer 3

I faced the same issue on a dialogOverlay and I fixed it. I realized that on clicking the overlay button that would bring the overlay, selenium was searching for the element before the overlay loads the dynamic content. So I did this:

   def download():
    global browser
    notFound = True
    while(notFound):
        try:
            
            elem = browser.find_element(By.ID, 'btnFormat2')
            elem.click()
            notFound = False
        except BaseException:
            print("----Error Download Element not found")
            
download()

The code will continuously look for the element until its loaded on the overlay.

Answered By: Stones

Selenium cannot find element in main window

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