How to avoid "StaleElementReferenceException" in Selenium?

Question

I am implementing a lot of Selenium tests using Java. Sometimes, my tests fail due to a StaleElementReferenceException. Could you suggest some approaches to making the tests more stable?

Answer 1

This can happen if a DOM operation happening on the page is temporarily causing the element to be inaccessible. To allow for those cases, you can try to access the element several times in a loop before finally throwing an exception.

Try this excellent solution from darrelgrainger.blogspot.com:

public boolean retryingFindClick(By by) {     boolean result = false;     int attempts = 0;     while(attempts < 2) {         try {             driver.findElement(by).click();             result = true;             break;         } catch(StaleElementException e) {         }         attempts++;     }     return result; } 

Answer 2

I was having this issue intermittently. Unbeknownst to me, BackboneJS was running on the page and replacing the element I was trying to click. My code looked like this.

driver.findElement(By.id("checkoutLink")).click(); 

Which is of course functionally the same as this.

WebElement checkoutLink = driver.findElement(By.id("checkoutLink")); checkoutLink.click(); 

What would occasionally happen was the javascript would replace the checkoutLink element in between finding and clicking it, ie.

WebElement checkoutLink = driver.findElement(By.id("checkoutLink")); // javascript replaces checkoutLink checkoutLink.click(); 

Which rightfully led to a StaleElementReferenceException when trying to click the link. I couldn't find any reliable way to tell WebDriver to wait until the javascript had finished running, so here's how I eventually solved it.

new WebDriverWait(driver, timeout)     .ignoring(StaleElementReferenceException.class)     .until(new Predicate<WebDriver>() {         @Override         public boolean apply(@Nullable WebDriver driver) {             driver.findElement(By.id("checkoutLink")).click();             return true;         }     }); 

This code will continually try to click the link, ignoring StaleElementReferenceExceptions until either the click succeeds or the timeout is reached. I like this solution because it saves you having to write any retry logic, and uses only the built-in constructs of WebDriver.