How can Selenium webdriver decide if it is a stale element in one page or a new element in another page?

Question

I ran into this weird situation.

1. I am first at page 1, which has an element with id of "abc", I use "abc" to find webElement and get its text value

2. I click on a link in page 1, it takes me to page 2

3. In page 2, there is also an element with id of "abc", when i try to use "abc" to find element and get its text value, webdriver gives me a "stale element exception, element not attached to DOM etc"

I google to get to this page, http://docs.seleniumhq.org/exceptions/stale_element_reference.jsp. It explains that "is that page that the element was part of has been refreshed, or the user has navigated away to another page... the driver has no way to determine that the replacements are actually what's expected"

So how to solve this kind of question? In theory, there is no way for webdriver to know that these elements are in two different pages.

It's worth to notice that if i insert a hard coded delay (a thread sleep etc) in between the page switch, the stale issue will not appear.

Thanks,

Answer 1

hi please do it like below if you want to get rid of Stale element exception

// Case one - when you are simply calling firstPageText two time
// then before calling it on the next page please re identify it 
// to get rid of stale element exception.

   String firstPageText =  driver.findElement(By.id("abc")).getText();
   System.out.println("Text on the first page is : " + firstPageText);

   driver.findElement(By.linkText("to second page ")).click();

   String secondPageText =  driver.findElement(By.id("abc")).getText();
   System.out.println("Text on the Second page is : " + secondPageText );

also if u have created a method which performs the above scenario then to avoid above error please make two separate methods one for page 1 and one for page two both having its individual identification strategy.

Answer 2

A stale element is an element that has been removed from the page. So in your case, you are probably getting the element just before the document is updated. To avoid this situation, you could first wait for the element to become stale before getting the new element:

// get the element
WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("abc"));

// trigger the update of the document
driver.findElement(By.id("my-button")).click();

// wait for the element to become stale
WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 20);
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.stalenessOf(element));

// get the new element
WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("abc"));