Skip to main content

Selenium Error "Element is not currently interactable and may not be manipulated"

Image
By
Selenium webdriver can drive different browsers like as Firefox, Chrome or Internet Explorer. These browsers actually cover the majority of internet users, so testing these browsers possibly covers the 90% of the internet users. However, there is no guaranty that the same automation scripts can work without a failure on these three browsers. For this reason, automation code should be error-prone for the browsers you want to cover.

The following error is caught when the test script run for Chrome and Internet Explorer, but surprisingly there is no error for the Firefox. Selenium gives an error like below:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\workspace\sample_project\sample_run.py", line 10, in <module>
    m.login()
  File "D:\workspace\sample_project\test_case_imps.py", line 335, in login
    driver.find_element_by_id("id_username").clear()
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.35.0-py2.7.egg\selenium\webdriver\remote\webelement.py", line 62, in clear
    self._execute(Command.CLEAR_ELEMENT)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.35.0-py2.7.egg\selenium\webdriver\remote\webelement.py", line 228, in _execute
    return self._parent.execute(command, params)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.35.0-py2.7.egg\selenium\webdriver\remote\webdriver.py", line 165, in execute
    self.error_handler.check_response(response)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.35.0-py2.7.egg\selenium\webdriver\remote\errorhandler.py", line 164, in check_response
    raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.InvalidElementStateException: Message: u'invalid element state: Element is not currently interactable and may not be manipulated\n  (Session info: chrome=29.0.1547.76)\n  (Driver info: chromedriver=2.3,platform=Windows NT 6.2 x86_64)'

In this example, while Firefox can find the element, however Chrome and Internet Explorer can't find the element. This is because the Firefox can load the page little bit faster than the other, and when the other browsers look up the element, it not loaded yet. To solve the problem we can let the browser wait until the browsers can load the element. time.sleep(1)  adds the following piece of code wait for 1 second before executing the line 335. Similarly, driver.implicitly_wait(1) can be used.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

driver = webdriver.Firefox()

driver.find_element_by_css_selector("span.ml5.dib").click()
time.sleep(1) 
driver.find_element_by_id("id_username").clear()
driver.find_element_by_id("id_username").send_keys("tst@test.com")



A better approach is to wait until a dynamic object in the opening page is visible which means that the page is loaded correctly. Then we can click the object. The loading time can be different because of the browser and the connection speed. Therefore this approach can solve other possibilities. You can use WebDriverWait, to use this you must import this library first as in the example. 

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait # available since 2.4.0
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC # available since 2.26.0

driver = webdriver.Firefox()

driver.find_element_by_css_selector("span.ml5.dib").click()

# wait until a dynamic object to be visible 
# for as much as timeout, as 10 second here
try:
    element = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, "myDynamicElement")))
finally:
    driver.quit()

driver.find_element_by_id("id_username").clear()
driver.find_element_by_id("id_username").send_keys("tst@test.com")
Labels:Software testing

Popular posts for software testing and automation

Change Default Timeout and Wait Time of Capybara

By
One of the biggest challenge for automation is handling timeout problem. Most of the time, timeout is 60 seconds but it may sometimes not enough if you have badly designed asynchronous calls or the third party ajax calls. This makes handling timeout more complex. set large enough to tolerate network related problems. For Selenium based automation frameworks, like Capybara, default Webdriver timeout is set to Net::ReadTimeout (Net::ReadTimeout) Changing ReadTimeout If you have timeout problem for Capybara, it gives an error like above. This means that the page is not fully loaded in given timeout period. Even you can see that page is loaded correctly but webdriver wait until the Ajax calls finish. class BufferedIO #:nodoc: internal use only def initialize (io) @io = io @read_timeout = 60 @continue_timeout = nil @debug_output = nil @rbuf = '' end . . . . . def rbuf_fill beg
Read more

Page-Object Pattern for Selenium Test Automation with Python

By
Page-object model is a pattern that you can apply it to develop efficient automation framework. With the page-model, it is possible to minimize maintenance cost. Basically page-object means that your every page is inherited from a base class which includes basic functionalities for every page. If you have some new functionalities that every page should have, you can simple add it to the base class. Base class is like the following: In this part we are creating pages which are inherited from base page. Every page has its own functionalities written as python functions. Some functions return to a new page, it means that these functions leave the current page and produce a new page. You should write as much as functions you need in the assertion part because this is the only part you can use the webdriver functions to interact with web pages . This part can be evaluate as providing data to assertion part.   The last part is related to asserting your test cases against to the
Read more

Create an Alias for Interactive Console Work: Selenium and Capybara

By
If you are working on shell most of the time Aliases are very helpfull and time saving. For testing purposes you can use Alias for getting ready your test suites. In this post, I want to explain both running Selenium and Capybara on console and creating aliases for each.  This post is for Windows machines, if you are using Unix-like see   this post . Creating Scripts for Selenium and Capybara First of all, it is assumed that you have installed Selenium and Capybara correctly and they work on your machines. If you haven't installed, you can see my previous posts. I am using the Selenium with Python and the Capybara with Ruby. You can use several different language for Selenium but Capybara works only with Ruby.  Create scripts in a directory called scripts (in your home folder, like as  ~/scripts ) for your automation tool as following, save them as capybara.rb, sel.py :  Creating Aliases Depends on your favourite shell, you need to add the alias to .bashrc bash
Read more

Performance Testing on CI: Locust is running on Jenkins

By
For a successful Continuous Integration pipeline, there should be jobs for testing the performance of the application. It is necessary if the application is still performing well. Generally performance testing is thought as kinds of activities performed one step before going to live. In general approach it is true but don't forget to test your application's performance as soon as there is an testable software, such as an api end point, functions, and etc. For CI it is a good approach to testing performance after functional testing and just before the deployment of next stage. In this post, I want to share some info about Jenkins and Locust. In my previous post you can find some information about Locust and Jenkins. Jenkins operates the CI environment and Locust is a tool for performance testing. To run the Locust on Jenkins you need command line arguments which control the number of clients ,   hatch rate,  running locust without web interface and there should be so
Read more