NoSuchElement Exception using find_element_by_link_text when implicitly_wait doesn't work?

Question

New to python and Selenium and programming for that matter.

I am trying to automate selenium to hit a specific link. In this case, I want it to hit the link associated with the link text "B":

<li><a href="javascript:__doPostBack(&#39;ctl00$IndexControl1&#39;,&#39;B&#39;)">B</a>

on this website:

http://www.lw.com

I am using this code:

def get_single_link_using_find_elements_by_link_name(url, link_name):
    driver = webdriver.Firefox()
    driver.get(url)
    driver.implicitly_wait(10)
    time.sleep(20)
    element = driver.find_element_by_link_text(link_name)
    element.click()

I added some wait conditions, because I thought the problem might have been a rendering problem, but they didnt help.

I am getting the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python27\programs\selenium commands.py", line 50, in <module>
    get_single_link_using_find_elements_by_link_name(url, link_name)
  File "C:\Python27\programs\selenium commands.py", line 47, in get_single_link_using_find_elements_by_link_name
    element = driver.find_element_by_link_text(link_name)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.25.0-py2.7.egg\selenium\webdriver\remote\webdriver.py", line 237, in find_element_by_link_text
    return self.find_element(by=By.LINK_TEXT, value=link_text)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.25.0-py2.7.egg\selenium\webdriver\remote\webdriver.py", line 671, in find_element
    {'using': by, 'value': value})['value']
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.25.0-py2.7.egg\selenium\webdriver\remote\webdriver.py", line 156, in execute
    self.error_handler.check_response(response)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.25.0-py2.7.egg\selenium\webdriver\remote\errorhandler.py", line 147, in check_response
    raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
NoSuchElementException: Message: u'Unable to locate element: {"method":"link text","selector":"B"}'

Oddly enough, the same code WORKS on the following url, which is part of the same site: http://www.lw.com/people?searchIndex=A

Any ideas?

Answer 1

1. Your code works for me, when I pass it a page that has the alphabetic listing index. This means that you're passing the wrong variables to the function-- the page that you're passing in, doesn't have a link named 'B', plain and simple.

2. You can check whether or not the alphabetic thing is on the page by calling driver.find_element_by_id("IndexControl1"). IndexControl1 is the name of the id in which the alphabetic thing is contained.

   alphabet = driver.find_element_by_id("IndexControl1")
   link_b = alphabet.find_element_by_link_text("B")
   

3. Incidentally, something else to watch out for is that if you're already on the page with "B" selected, e.g. http://www.lw.com/people?searchIndex=B&esmode=1, the letter B does not show up as a link and you will end up with a NoSuchElementException in this case, as well.

I think that covers pretty much every case where NoSuchElementException could pop up. Good luck.