Selenium click() event seems not to be always triggered => results in timeout?

Question

Here's what I do:

selenium.click("link=mylink"); selenium.waitForPageToLoad(60000);  // do something, then navigate to a different page  // (window focus is never changed in-between)  selenium.click("link=mylink"); selenium.waitForPageToLoad(60000); 

The link "mylink" does exist, the first invocation of click() always works. But the second click() sometimes seems to work, sometimes not.

It looks like the click() event is not triggered at all, because the page doesn't even start to load. Unfortunately this behaviour is underterministic.

Here's what I already tried:

1. Set longer time timeout
   => did not help

2. Wait for an element present after loading one page
   => doesn't work either since the page does not even start to load

For now I ended up invoking click() twice, so:

selenium.click("link=mylink"); selenium.waitForPageToLoad(60000);  // do something, then navigate to a different page  // (window focus is never changed in-between)  selenium.click("link=mylink"); selenium.click("link=mylink"); selenium.waitForPageToLoad(60000); 

That will work, but it's not a really nice solution. I've also seen in another forum where someone suggested to write something like a 'clickAndWaitWithRetry':

  try {       super.click("link=mylink");       super.waitForPageToLoad(60000);   }   catch (SeleniumException e) {       super.click("link=mylink");       super.waitForPageToLoad(60000);   } 

But I think that is also not a proper solution.... Any ideas/explanations why the click() event is sometimes not triggered?

Answer 1

Sometimes, seemingly randomly, Selenium just doesn't like to click certain anchor tags. I am not sure what causes it, but it happens. I find in those cases w/ a troublesome link instead of doing

selenium.click(...) 

do

selenium.fireEvent( locator, 'click' ); 

As others have stated above me, I have specifically had issues with anchor tags that appear as follows:

<a href="javascript:...." > 

Answer 2

I've done selenium for awhile, and I really have developed a dislike for waitForPageToLoad(). You might consider always just waiting for the element in question to exist.

I find that this method seems to resolve most weird issues I run into like this. The other possibility is that you may have some javascript preventing the link from doing anything when clicked the first time. It seems unlikely but worth a double-check.