Clicking Web Links in Selenium Webdriver

Question

My question is simple- Using Selenium, how do you keep on clicking links when each hyper link opens up in a new page or new window or opens in the same web page.

For example I have following links on a webpage: Log in Sign up Forgot Password? Signup with us follow this link Home Terms Privacy Policy

Here is the small snippet of code that I have written to click these mentioned links on webpage:

List<WebElement> elements = driver.findElements(By.tagName("a"));
        //clicking all links
        for (WebElement el : elements){
            System.out.println("Link getting clicked"  + el.getText());
            el.click();
            driver.navigate().back();
        }

As you can see I am trying to get links and trying to click them one by one. However, I am getting an error after the first click itself. Console says: "org.openqa.selenium.StaleElementReferenceException: Element is no longer attached to the DOM".

I am petty sure I know the cause as the links are getting opened on the same webpage, but I am doing a back navigation, which is not helping me at all.

Any thoughts / suggestions?

Answer 1

This could be due to program execution advancing to the call to "driver.navigate().back();" before the page has loaded.

Try introducing an implicit wait , which tells the "WebDriver to poll the DOM for a certain amount of time when trying to find an element or elements if they are not immediately available"

eg When you create your web driver try:

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(2, TimeUnit.SECONDS);

Answer 2

You have to refind the element whenever a page is reloaded before you can interact with it, for your code, please try modify them to this:

    driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(3000, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);
    List<WebElement> elements = driver.findElements(By.tagName("a"));
    //clicking all links
    for (int i=0; i<elements.size(); i++){
        WebElement el = driver.findElements(By.tagName("a")).get(i);            
        System.out.println("Link getting clicked"  + el.getText());
        el.click();
        driver.navigate().back();
    }