Element visible but not present in DOM

Question

I am using Selenium for HCI tests, but Selenium couldn't find an element that was visible, intrigued, I searched it and came to the conclusion that, the element is visible but not present in the DOM.

I may be mistaken (likely), but it's what it seems to be for me.

I have a website with an element, Parcourir :

When I click on it, I can see this div element:

Here is the problem now, There is an element Bibliothèque at the top of the window, when I open the Browser Developer Tools, and inspect it, I find its id and XPath, the element HTML code is below:

<a href="#media-tab-media_default--media_browser_1"
data-tabid="media_default--media_browser_1" title="Bibliothèque" class="ui-tabs-anchor"
role="presentation" tabindex="-1" id="ui-id-3">
    Bibliothèque
</a>

But when I tried to download the DOM, just like its said in this answer: How can I dump the entire Web DOM in its current state in Chrome?.

I can't find the above element in the DOM, I have an element that I can see in my Browser, which is not present in the DOM. That's may be why selenium give me the Exception:

Caused by: org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchElementException: Unable to locate element: //*[@id='ui-id-3']

Yes! That was it, thank you. Should I post an answer and close the question? What should I do now? — Hamza Ince, Jan 20 '21 at 13:28

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 25 '21 at 10:48

2

As element is inside iframe you have to switch to it first:

The syntax for switch to frame is

driver.switchTo().frame(id);

If you have multiple iframes and there is no id find each iframes uniquely as you do for other elements , using any other attributes like Id,class etc of the specific iframe

driver.switchTo().frame(driver.findElement(By.xpath("//iframe[@class=\"class\"]")));

Now remember to switch outside the frame to interact with elements outside the iframe again.

  driver.switchTo().defaultContent();

edited Jan 25 '21 at 10:48

Hamza Ince

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answered Jan 20 '21 at 13:40

PDHide

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Hello, the syntax should be webdriver.switchTo().frame(frameId); since it's Java. :) – Hamza Ince Jan 25 '21 at 10:33

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 20 '21 at 13:30

0

As mentioned by @PDHide, the problem was that the element was inside a frame, I just switched to the frame, like below:

webdriver.switchTo().frame(frameId);

And it worked.

answered Jan 20 '21 at 13:30

Hamza Ince

604
17
46

Element visible but not present in DOM

2 Answers2