C# system.stackoverflow exception

Question

I'm getting a stackoverflow exception on a if/else statement..

Example of code:

if (driver.FindElements(By.XPath("//*[@id='modal']/div/div/div/p[contains(text(), 'Hello World')]")).Count != 0)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Hello World");
}
else
{
    RunOtherFunction();
}

highlighted error code is -

if (driver.FindElements(By.XPath("//*[@id='modal']/div/div/div/p[contains(text(), 'Hello World')]")).Count != 0)

so clearly it's throwing a exception due to not finding the specified element but I have that covered with an else statement?

so I don't understand why it's throwing an exception because if Element isn't found then it should execute " RunOtherFunction(); " instead it's throwing exception?

I don't think selenium would throw a StackOverflowException just because it can't find an element by xpath. Are you using some recursion? Is RunOtherFunction calling the function you're trying to find element by xpath? I think we might need to see some more code to help. — nick, Apr 19 '18 at 20:57

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 19 '18 at 20:11

0

The highlighted row is correct. It throws exception on the first line and since you don't have a try catch block it won't go into the else.

answered Apr 19 '18 at 20:11

Anton Angelov

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2

if the exception is truly a StackOverflowException, you (generally) can't catch it anyways. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/1599238/1224272 – nick Apr 19 '18 at 20:15
I know that. My point is that from the provided info, I doubt that really a StackOverflow exception is thrown. I believe ElementNotFoundException is thrown or something similar. – Anton Angelov Apr 20 '18 at 10:20

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 20 '18 at 15:38

An Answer based on Java perspective :

I did a small test with the similar usecase where :

I opened the url https://www.google.com/
Used findElements() to find elements with id as Rs_Sele on the page in a if-else {} loop and used != operator to compare with 0

Here is the sample code :

WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);
driver.get("https://www.google.com/");
if(driver.findElements(By.id("Rs_Sele")).size() !=0)
    System.out.println("Atleast one element was found");
else
    System.out.println("No element was found");

Console Output :
```
No element was found
```

Analysis

The Java Docs of findElements() mentions that this method finds all elements within the current context using the provided mechanism. This method will return as soon as there are more than 0 items in the found collection or will return an empty list if the timeout is reached.
So the findElements() method returned an empty list and after the comparision the control went to the else {} block and printed No element was found.
The same happened with your code block as well.
driver.FindElements(By.XPath("//*[@id='modal']/div/div/div/p[contains(text(), 'Hello World')]")) returned an empty list
After the comparision through != operator with 0 else {} block was executed and subsequently RunOtherFunction() function was invoked.

Conclusion

If you are observing stackoverflow exception it is because of the function RunOtherFunction();

References

You can find similar discussions on StackOverflowException in :

C# system.stackoverflow exception

2 Answers2

Analysis

Conclusion

References