How can I make Selenium click through a variable number of "next" buttons?

Question

I have an internal web application that has a modal dialog. Unfortunately I cannot post the actual web application location here, but let me describe this as best as possible.

When the application starts, you get a box on the screen that tells you a bunch of text. You can press "next" to get the next page of text.
On the final page, the "next" button is disabled, and the rest of the UI of the web application is enabled.
There are a variable number of pages, so I don't know how many times I have to click "next".

I'm able to click through a fixed number of times (ex: if I know there's two pages I can click twice) but I am unsure how to vary this so that it'll run no matter what number of pages I have. I would like a general solution; presumably this uses a loop of some sort that would check if the button is enabled. If it is, then click it. If it's disabled, then exit the loop.

The question is: How can I set up a loop in Selenium that clicks a button repeatedly until it is disabled?

Here's the code I've tried:

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

# Create a new instance of the Firefox driver
driver = webdriver.Firefox()

driver.get("http://localhost/myapp")

try:
    wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 100)    
    wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID,'menuIntroBox_buttonNext')))    
    driver.find_element_by_id("menuIntroBox_buttonNext").click()

    # Click through the introduction text... this is the problematic code.
    # Here I tried to wait for the element to be clickable, then tried to do a while 
    # loop so I can click on it as long as it's clickable, but it never seems to do the
    # break.
    wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID,'main_buttonMissionTextNext')))
    while EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID,'main_buttonMissionTextNext')):
        element = driver.find_element_by_id("main_buttonMissionTextNext")
        element.click()
        print "Waiting until it's clickable."

        if not element.is_enabled():
            break

    print "Here is where I'd do other stuff.... the stuff I want to actually do in the test case."
finally:
    driver.quit()

Why are you checking the same condition in the `while` and in an `if not… break` inside the `while`? — abarnert, Apr 05 '13 at 00:49
Meanwhile, are you sure the "Next" button is actually disabled? If it's, say, enabled but just does nothing, `element_to_be_clickable` will be true. — abarnert, Apr 05 '13 at 00:51
This isn't just one question. It is a whole bunch of questions. Can you please edit your question and narrow it down to something we can specifically help you with? — djangofan, Apr 05 '13 at 02:05
@abarnert: The button does become disabled, I've checked the DOM. The "if not ..." was just an idea, since the button is disabled only after you click on it. I can edit this, but the code still doesn't work as intended. — Irwin, Apr 05 '13 at 02:32

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 05 '13 at 03:00

Figured it out. Here's the relevant code block:

wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID, 'main_buttonMissionTextNext')))
while EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID,'main_buttonMissionTextNext')):
    driver.find_element_by_id("main_buttonMissionTextNext").click()
    if not driver.find_element_by_id("main_buttonMissionTextNext").click().is_enabled():
        break
    wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID, 'main_buttonMissionTextNext')))

Two things I found out:

You can check if an element is enabled using is_enabled().
You have to re-search the DOM for the element after clicking on it. I'm guessing that the dialog redraws itself, so you need to find it again.

I can likely refactor this to look nicer but the basic idea is here now.

e1che · Answer 2 · 2013-04-05T09:54:06.067

0

While driver.find_element_by_id("main_buttonMissionTextNext").isEnabled() {
  driver.find_element_by_id("main_buttonMissionTextNext").click();
  sleep(1);
}

//sleep function is in java, so you can "translate" it in python 
void sleep(int i){
  driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(i, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
}

try it and tell me what's up.

edited Apr 05 '13 at 09:54

answered Apr 05 '13 at 09:22

e1che

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How can I make Selenium click through a variable number of "next" buttons?

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