Clicking on javascript anchor with htmlunit does not seem to work

Question

I am using htmlunit to automatically go through a website. Here is the problem:

I want to click on an anchor in order to display a new page of a given table.

Here is the anchor:

<a href="javascript:__doPostBack('GridView1','Page$7')">7</a>

Here is my code:

final HtmlAnchor a = page2.getAnchorByText("7");
HtmlPage page3 = a.click();
System.out.println(page2.getWebResponse().getContentAsString())
System.out.println(page3.getWebResponse().getContentAsString());

I do not have any error message. When I compare my print out, they are identical, and yet they shouldn't be, as I just clicked on an anchor. First print out should display a certain page of the table, a the second print out another one.

The stackoverflow post struggling to click on link within htmlunit renders a very similar problem, however his solution (setting the browser version to the webclient) does not appear to work in my case.

Answer 1

Maybe you need to wait for the javascript to excute and load first. I suggest to use the following command:

webClient.waitForBackgroundJavaScript(1000);

or even:

JavaScriptJobManager manager = page.getEnclosingWindow().getJobManager();
while (manager.getJobCount() > 0) {
    Thread.sleep(100);
}

and yet another option:

webClient.setAjaxController(new NicelyResynchronizingAjaxController());
webClient.setAjaxController(new AjaxController(){
    @Override
    public boolean processSynchron(HtmlPage page, WebRequest request, boolean async)
    {
        return true;
    }
});