selenium WebDriver StaleElementReferenceException

I used a FluentWait and also the ExpectedCondition apply override: https://gist.github.com/djangofan/5112655 . This one handles the exception inside the finalized block, unlike how other people answer this, and allows the successive tries to be wrapped in that block. I think this is more elegant.

public static void clickByLocator( final By locator ) {
  final long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
  driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait( 5, TimeUnit.SECONDS );
  Wait<WebDriver> wait = new FluentWait<WebDriver>( driver )
        .withTimeout(90000, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS)
        .pollingEvery(5500, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);
        //.ignoring( StaleElementReferenceException.class );        
  wait.until( new ExpectedCondition<Boolean>() { 
    @Override 
    public Boolean apply( WebDriver webDriver ) {
      try {
        webDriver.findElement( locator ).click();
        return true;
      } catch ( StaleElementReferenceException e ) {                      // try again
        return false;
      }     
    } 
  } );      
  driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait( DEFAULT_IMPLICIT_WAIT, TimeUnit.SECONDS );
  long endTime   = System.currentTimeMillis();
  long totalTime = endTime - startTime;
  log("Finished click after waiting for " + totalTime + " milliseconds.");
}

You might be trying to get any of element properties after clicking an element.

I had the same issue, I was trying to getText() of button after it was clicked. In my case, once button is clicked, new window comes.

a quick & dirty solution:

el.click()

time.sleep(1)

then continue to parse in iteration way

I made some changes to be more flexible:

   delegate void StaleFunction(IWebElement elt);
        private static void StaleElementHandleByID(By by, StaleFunction func )
        {
            int count = 0;
            while (count < 4)
            {
                try
                {
                    IWebElement yourSlipperyElement = Driver.FindElement(by);
                    func(yourSlipperyElement);
                    count = count + 4;
                }
                catch (StaleElementReferenceException e)
                {
                    count = count + 1;
                }

            }
        }

 StaleElementHandleByID(By.Id("identDdl"),
                    delegate(IWebElement elt)
                {
                    SelectElement select = new SelectElement(elt);
                    select.SelectByText(tosave.ItemEquipamentoCem.CodigoCne.ToString());
                });

It also encountered this issue, It looks very obvious the modal panel loading falls into a race condition and keeps waiting till time out.

I have tried many times, and found the solution is to hold the modal panel loading till it can be exactly found by webDriver and at the same time keep refresh the webDriver instance , then try to find WebElements within the modal panel.

So the solution is like follows: e.g. MyModalPanel is your ModalPanel Id, then do the following

page.openModalPanel();
Assert.assertTrue(page.waitTillDisplay( "MyModalPanelContentDiv"), Wait.MODAL_PANEL));
page.fillInFormInModalpanel(formObj);

and the waitTillDisplay code can be found on WebDriver website, I will just paste my code here for your reference:

public Boolean waitTillDisplay(final String id, int waitSeconds){

    WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, waitSeconds);
        Boolean displayed = wait.until(new ExpectedCondition<Boolean>() {
              public Boolean apply(WebDriver driver) {
                  return driver.findElement(By.id(id)).isDisplayed();
              }

        });
        return displayed;

}

We get around this issue by doing something called WebdriverWrapper and WebElementWrapper.

What these wrappers do is handle the StaleElementException within and then use the locator to re-evaluate and get the new WebElement object. This way, you need to spread the code handling the exception all over your codebase and localize it to one class.

I will look into open sourcing just these couple of classes soon and add a link here if you folk are interested.

-Pavan

That exception is thrown when you try to use a method of a WebElement that is not longer on the page. If your grid is dynamically loading data and you refresh the grid, any references to elements on that grid would be 'stale'. Double check that the element you're trying to reference is on the page in your tests, and you may need to re-instantiate the object.