Selenium java How to tell if an element is stale from debugger

Question

Selenium: is there a way to tell if an element is stale from debugger such as Eclipse?

org.openqa.selenium.StaleElementReferenceException: stale element reference: element is not attached to the page document

Answer 1

Stale element errors is what happens when your test has fetched an element from an outdated version of the DOM. More specifically when the element that the test has is no longer attached to the DOM.

The trick to avoiding stale element errors is to make sure the test doesn't fetch elements from the DOM until the page has finished loading. Also make sure that if interacting with an element causes the state to change significantly, that the test does not attempt to retrieve those elements until the state of the application has fully transitioned.

Here's a good overview of stale elements from Mozilla: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/WebDriver/Errors/StaleElementReference