Selenium Automation – Interaction issue

Question

I am working on a bot capable of login into a webpage (postmark.com). To do that, I am using selenium and python. As it is right now my code is capable of accessing the webpage, clicking on the login tap, inserting the user name and password; however, when it comes to clicking on the Login tap (to access the account) I get the following error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/pi/Documents/Bot_Poshmark.py", line 20, in <module>
    WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable(Log)).click()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/support/wait.py", line 80, in until
    raise TimeoutException(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.TimeoutException: Message:

The bizarre think about this, is that sometimes (like 2 or 3) the same piece of code that I wrote, can complete all the steps. Here is my code (I am using a Raspberry Pi 4 for this)

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get("https://www.poshmark.com") #Open webpage
Log_Field=(By.XPATH, "//a[contains(text(),'Log in')]")
Email= (By.XPATH, "//input[@placeholder='Username or Email']")
Pass= (By.XPATH, "//input[@placeholder='Password']")
Log= (By.XPATH, "//button[@class='btn btn--primary']")

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable(Log_Field)).click()
WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable(Email)).send_keys("xxx@xx.com")
WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable(Pass)).send_keys("123456")
WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable(Log)).click()

Do anyone have an idea on why this is happening? Thank you

Answer 1

To send a character sequence to the Username or Email and Password field you need to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

• Using CSS_SELECTOR:

  driver.get("https://poshmark.com/")
  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "a[href='/login']"))).click()
  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "input#login_form_username_email"))).send_keys("xxx@xx.com")
  driver.find_element_by_css_selector("input#login_form_password").send_keys("123456")
  driver.find_element_by_css_selector("button.btn.blue.btn-primary").click()
  

• Using XPATH:

  driver.get("https://poshmark.com/")
  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//a[text()='Log in']"))).click()
  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//input[@id='login_form_username_email']"))).send_keys("xxx@xx.com")
  driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@id='login_form_password']").send_keys("123456")
  driver.find_element_by_xpath("//button[@class='btn blue btn-primary']").click()
  

• Note : You have to add the following imports :

  from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
  from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
  from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
  

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This usecase

In this usecase, the line:

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable(Log)).click()

was unable to identify the desired element within the desired time frame hence you faced TimeoutException.

However, from TimeoutException it will be tough to dig out the actual result of the failure.

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Solution

As a solution to know about the exact cause of the failure, you need to remove the WebDriverWait and replace the line of code with either:

• find_element_by_class_name(name)
• find_element_by_css_selector(css_selector)
• find_element_by_id(id)
• find_element_by_link_text(link_text)
• find_element_by_name(name)
• find_element_by_partial_link_text(partial_link_text)
• find_element_by_tag_name(tag_name)
• find_element_by_xpath(xpath)

If required you can slow down the search inducing waits through time.sleep(secs) while debugging.

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References

You can find a couple of relevant discussions in:

• selenium.common.exceptions.TimeoutException while invoking .click() on an element through expected_conditions
• ExpectedConditions.ElementIsVisible returns TimeoutException even when element is present