How I can avoid "Element is not currently visible and so may not be interacted with " Selenium Webdriver

Question

Am using selenium webdriver 2.210 + JAVA for testing.I have a sample code for selecting all mails in gmail.But the code throws an "Element is not currently visible and so may not be interacted with" error when i tries to put a 5sec delay after getting URL through webdriver.Is it possible to make this code working with delay?

    driver.get("https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#all");
        delay(5);  ////*......Working fine without this...........*////
    driver.switchTo().frame(driver.findElement(By.id("canvas_frame")));
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div[@class = 'T-Jo-auh']")).click();

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Are you sure you're looking at the right element? I had a similar problem and it turned out there were two similar elements on the page, one visible and the other not. The FindElement function was returning the one that wasn't visible.

I solved this by using FindElements instead of FindElement and then using Linq to extract the one that was visible.

Answer 2

Here is a summary of things you can do to tackle the problem (examples in Protractor/Javascript):

• maximize the browser window (on Chrome+Mac, currently you have to do it differently):

  browser.driver.manage().window().maximize();
  

• verify that there are no other elements matching the locator. You can get this error if there is an another element matching the locator that is actually invisible.

• wait for the element to be clickable:

  var EC = protractor.ExpectedConditions,
      elm = element(by.id("myid"));
  
  browser.wait(EC.elementToBeClickable(elm), 5000);
  

• scroll into view of the element:

  var elm = element(by.id("myid"));
  browser.executeScript("arguments[0].scrollIntoView();", elm);
  

• click via javascript:

  var elm = element(by.id("myid"));
  browser.executeScript("arguments[0].click();", elm);
  

• move to element and click via "browser actions":

  var elm = element(by.id("myid"));
  browser.actions()
      .mouseMove(elm)
      .click()
      .perform();