Selenium: Clicking on toaster issues

Question

I'm trying to click on an element on a page; the element is clearly visible on screen. There is a toaster that might pop up, so I'm trying to write a defense: if the toaster is on screen, close the toaster first, then continue clicking through to the next page. I am using PageFactory, so I have an element to contain the toaster and one for the close button for the toaster. My "deal with toaster" method is as follows:

if (driver.findElements(By.cssSelector("#toaster")).size() > 0 
    && toaster.isDisplayed()) {
    toasterClose.click();
}

When I do this in chrome, however, I'm getting org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException: unknown error: Element is not clickable at point (994, 758)

Pausing the test execution, I cannot see the toaster on the screen. I figure the devs must be hiding it by making it render in a far away, unscrollable location. So as a stopgap measure, I added a condition that if the x coordinate was greater than 800, don't click. With that in place, I get:

org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException: unknown error: Element is not clickable at point (547, 725). Other element would receive the click: <div id="toaster">...</div>

What's going on? How can the toaster not be clickable but would somehow receive the click anyway? Firefox can handle the test just fine, with or without the 800 pixel workaround; it's only Chrome having this issue.

For Clarification: The goal of the test is NOT to click the toaster. The goal is to click another element on the page. The test reported that a toaster was in the way, so I attempted to write a step to close the toaster if it is displayed. I have not seen this toaster, so I'm not exactly sure what it is, but chrome keeps reporting that it's in the way. All our toasters site-wide use a basic template that includes a close button so the user can close the toaster, which is what I'm trying to click. Firefox never has this issue and does not report the existence of any toasters.

I'm calling it a toaster because that's what our site calls it, because that's what it's called in whatever framework we got it from (jQuery UI? Backbone?). If I pause execution, I cannot see any toasters at this point in the test, but jQuery tells me it exists and is visible. However, the element found with jQuery has just the default pieces of our toaster setup: a div, an empty div where the message should be, and the close button. Clearly it's not meant to be rendered at this time, but Chrome thinks it's in the way.

Answer 1

I'm assuming by "toaster" you mean some sort of javascript modal popup with a close button.

Identifying the correct problem
You're testing the existence and visibility of the #toaster element, but not the toasterClose element that you're clicking. There's no guarantee that just because one element exists and is displayed, another is as well. From the error, it appears that the #toaster element overlaps the toasterClose element, making it unclickable.

Troubleshooting clickability
Once you've properly selected toasterClose, manually use devtools and inspect to see why it's unclickable. Is it visible and unobstructed? Is the toasterClose element something of zero height/width? Is there dynamic JavaScript modifying the page post-load? Is it actually positioned in view of the page? (I've had elements render visibly at the edge of the window only to be obstructed by the browser's scroll bars.¹)

Alternative
You should also see if you really need to use this toasterClose element. How does would a human close this popup? Would they press Escape? Would they click outside the popup window, on the overlay element? Do they do something else that triggers some sort of closeModal() javascript function? You can also do any of these things using Selenium.

Last Resort
One thing you can always do to remove such a popup is to run your own javascript to modify the DOM and remove the offending element(s) altogether:

driver.execute_script(<<-javascript)
  var toaster = document.getElementById("toaster");
  toaster.parentNode.removeChild(toaster);

  var overlay = document.getElementById("modal_overlay");
  overlay.parentNode.removeChild(overlay);
javascript

Future/Additional
If this is a regular issue for you, I would suggest wrapping this code in try/catches and a retry mechanism to make it resilient to javascript dynamically loaded elements.

¹ Update
Just to elaborate on the scrollbar issue I had, because it turned out that it was a very similar problem to yours.

Here, the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button is out of view. If Selenium tries to click on it, first it will attempt to scroll it into view.

Here's an example of what Selenium would attempt to do. Notice how the button is now "in view".

However, Chrome on OSX is styled in such a way that the scrollbars are normally hidden. The moment that Selenium issues the scroll command, the scrollbars appear and the following click command fails to reach the button.

The solution was to use javascript to scroll the window manually:

page.execute_script(<<-javascript)
  document.getElementById("gbqfsb").scrollIntoView(true);
  // or if that doesn't work:
  window.scrollTo(0, document.getElementById("gbqfsb").getBoundingClientRect().top);
javascript

Answer 2

Try the following code. Should work:

if (driver.findElements(By.cssSelector("#toaster")).size() > 0 
    && toaster.isDisplayed()) {

    Actions builder = new Actions(driver);
    builder.moveToElement(toasterClose).moveByOffset(2,2).click().build().perform();

}

Answer 3

Can you close toaster using escape key from keyboard manually. If you can than use following:

Actions action = new Actions(driver); action.sendKeys(Keys.ESCAPE).build().perform();

Answer 4

It seems the toaster was partially rendered and fixed to the DOM just below the bottom edge of the screen, using position:fixed to stop it from showing up until it's ready to be populated with data and animated onto the screen. When chrome tried to click on links that were below the bottom edge of the screen, it predicted that it'd hit the toaster and didn't actually bother scrolling.

After some googling, I added the following utility function:

public static void ScrollElementIntoView(WebDriver driver, WebElement element) {
    ((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript("arguments[0].scrollIntoView(true);", element);
}

Then I call this method before clicking any link on that page, and voila, no more toaster problems!