Selenium WebDriver - determine if element is clickable (i.e. not obscured by dojo modal lightbox)

Question

I write automated scripts for testing web applications that are very heavy on ajax. For example, a modal dialog is displayed with the text "Saving..." when saving settings, while a lightbox greys out the rest of the page.

My test scripts are trying to click the next link in the test before the message disappears. It almost always works when driving Firefox, but when driving Chrome the following error is displayed:

Exception in thread "main" org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException: Element is not clickable at point (99.5, 118.5). Other element would receive the click: <div class="dijitDialogUnderlay _underlay" dojoattachpoint="node" id="lfn10Dijit_freedom_widget_common_environment_Dialog_8_underlay" style="width: 1034px; height: 1025px; "></div> (WARNING: The server did not provide any stacktrace information)

This happens because the lightbox is obscuring the element I want to click on. I want to wait for the lightbox to disappear before attempting to click the link.

Checking for the lightbox to no longer exist is not a valid workaround because there are, at times, multiple levels of modal dialogs and lightboxes, and no easy way to distinguish between them.

Is there a way in Selenium to detect if the element is clickable (no other elements obscuring it)? A try/catch would be a workaround, but I'd prefer to do a proper check if that is possible.

Answer 1

Use the WebDriverWait conditions.

    WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(yourWebDriver, 5);
    wait.until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By.xpath("//xpath_to_element")));

Webdriver will wait for 5 seconds for your element to be able to be clicked.

Answer 2

You can use the ExpectedConditions.invisibilityOfElementLocated(By by) method which waits until the element is either invisible or not present on the DOM.

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(yourWebDriver, 10);
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.invisibilityOfElementLocated(By.id("yourSavingModalDialogDiv")));

So, depending on how much time your modal dialog takes to go invisible or go off the DOM, webdriver will wait. The wait is for a maximum of 10 seconds.