click at at an arbitrary position in web browser with selenium 2 (Python binding)

Question

I am getting confused trying to find a way to send the left-click in a web browser window in a specific point. I am using Selenium selenium-2.44.0 and Python 2.7. My ultimate goal is to be able to click in certain areas in the window, but for now I just want to make sure I am able to click at all. I thought that clicking on an area where a link is located is a good idea because then I will be able to verify the click did occur (i.e., I will be taken to another html page).

All the prerequisites are met, I am able to start the browser and access and manipulate various web elements. From what I've found in the Help, one is supposed to use move_by_offset method to move the mouse cursor into a certain direction. However, when I run the code, the click doesn't occur (or it occurs, but the url link is not clicked and no new page opens). I cannot even verify whether the click occurred. When clicking the Logout link, for instance, in a normal browser session, the logout operation occurs.

...
homeLink = driver.find_element_by_link_text("Home")
homeLink.click() #clicking on the Home button and mouse cursor should? stay here
print homeLink.size, homeLink.location

helpLink = driver.find_element_by_link_text("Help")
print helpLink.size, helpLink.location

action = webdriver.common.action_chains.ActionChains(driver)
action.move_by_offset(150,0) #move 150 pixels to the right to access Help link
action.click()
action.perform()

Here is the screenshot of the area in the web page I am working with.

The size and location of the elements are printed as below:

{'width': 39, 'height': 16} {'y': 47, 'x': 341}
{'width': 30, 'height': 16} {'y': 47, 'x': 457}

The html code behind the page is below, if it's worth looking at.

<a href="/web/">Home</a>
|
<a href="/web/Account/LogOff">Logout</a>
|
<a href="#" onclick="HelpFile.open();">Help</a>

I know that I can access the link by finding an element in many ways, but I am trying to perform a click in a certain location and am using the link element just to verify the click really occurred.

How do perform the click?

Answer 1

Hard to say for you exact situation but I know a workaround to the question in the summary and bold

send the left-click in a web browser window in a specific point

You just use execute_script and do the clicking using javascript.

self.driver.execute_script('el = document.elementFromPoint(47, 457); el.click();')

It's convenient in a pinch because you can debug find the coordinates of an element in a browser by opening console and using querySelector (works the same as Webdriver's By.CSS_SELECTOR):

el = document.querySelector('div > h1');
var boundaries = el.getBoundingClientRect();
console.log(boundaries.top, boundaries.right, boundaries.bottom, boundaries.left);

That being said, it's a really bad idea to write your tests to click a specific point. But I have found that sometimes even when el.click() or an action chain aren't working, execute script will still work using a querySelector which is about as good as what you would be doing in Selenium.

self.driver.execute_script('el = document.querySelector("div > h1"); el.click();')