Cannot handle Sharepoint pop-up page in Selenium Webdriver

Question

I'm trying to automate a Sharepoint site using Selenium Webdriver, but cannot get my code to recognise the elements on the new popup.

The scenario is as follows; at one point in the script, we click on a link to a new noticeboard item. Hovering over this gives me the pointer, Javascript:OpenPopUpPage('/Lists/Noticeboard/NoticeboardNewFormMain.aspx') . When the link is clicked the popup appears and the parent screen is disabled as expected.

At this point the script tries to identify the first element on the popup:

    try{
        element = driver.findElement(By.xpath("/html/body/form/div[4]/div[1]/div/div[1]/div[2]/div[2]/div[2]/table/tbody/tr/td/div/div/div/div/div[1]/span[1]/table/tbody/tr[2]/td/div[1]/div[3]/span[1]/input"));
    }catch(Exception e){
        Log.error(sRepositoryName + " | txt_Title not found | Exception desc : "+e.getMessage());       
    } 
    return element;

I have checked the xpath using Firebug and this is correct for the first object on the popup. Looking through the xpath I can see that there is no iFrame specified and so trying driver.switchTo().frame(1) did not work.

I have also tried using driver.getwindowhandles() , but this only returns a single window so there is nothing to switch to.

Finally, i had seen others suggest that it may simply be a timing issue as the elements on the popup form have not been created when the script is checking for them, so I tried using Thread.sleep(15000) to give time for the popup to generate, but with no success.

No matter what I try, I still end up with an "Unable to locate element" exception for all elements on the popup. Does anyone have any ideas how to handle these popups?

Answer 1

The popup is changing the DOM but you are querying before the change has had affect.

You need to use Selenium's implicit wait mechanism for this:

http://www.seleniumhq.org/docs/04_webdriver_advanced.jsp

Answer 2

It appears that I have found a resolution.

When the popup opens it does not open a new frame, but seems to lose focus on the existing frame. I tried driver.switchTo().frame(0) before attempting to access the popup and this works.