Selenium: Click on dropdown is not working

Question

I am trying to use selenium click to open dropdown menu and then click again to download a file. Common error I get is that the "element is not attached to the page document" Have tried different codes but here's one:

#button = driver.find_element_by_xpath('//ul[@class="dropdown-menu-right dropdown-menu"]')
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10)
element = wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID, "options-dropdown")))
element.click()

HTML snapshot:

Answer 1

Generally <ul> nodes along with it's decendent <li> nodes gets expanded clicking on <span> nodes.

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Solution

To click and open the drop-down-menu i.e. to expand the <li> nodes you need to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use either of the following locator strategies:

• Using CSS_SELECTOR:

  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "span.dropdown-toggle#options-dropdown"))).click()
  

• Using XPATH:

  WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//span[@class='dropdown-toggle' and @id='options-dropdown']"))).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