Selenium click() event seems not to be always trig

Question

Here's what I do:

selenium.click("link=mylink");
selenium.waitForPageToLoad(60000);

// do something, then navigate to a different page 
// (window focus is never changed in-between)

selenium.click("link=mylink");
selenium.waitForPageToLoad(60000);

The link "mylink" does exist, the first invocation of click() always works. But the second click() sometimes seems to work, sometimes not.

It looks like the click() event is not triggered at all, because the page doesn't even start to load. Unfortunately this behaviour is underterministic.

Here's what I already tried:

1. Set longer time timeout
   => did not help

2. Wait for an element present after loading one page
   => doesn't work either since the page does not even start to load

For now I ended up invoking click() twice, so:

selenium.click("link=mylink");
selenium.waitForPageToLoad(60000);

// do something, then navigate to a different page 
// (window focus is never changed in-between)

selenium.click("link=mylink");
selenium.click("link=mylink");
selenium.waitForPageToLoad(60000);

That will work, but it's not a really nice solution. I've also seen in another forum where someone suggested to write something like a 'clickAndWaitWithRetry':

  try {
      super.click("link=mylink");
      super.waitForPageToLoad(60000);
  }
  catch (SeleniumException e) {
      super.click("link=mylink");
      super.waitForPageToLoad(60000);
  }

But I think that is also not a proper solution.... Any ideas/explanations why the click() event is sometimes not triggered?

Answer 1

I've been having the same issue and found that I have to get the text of the link first. I know it's not the ideal way to do it, but I'm fortunate my links are uniquely named.

C# code:

var text = Selenium.GetText(myLocator);
Selenium.Click("link=" + text);

Answer 2

I just tried WebDriver (Selenium 2.0) and found that WebElement#sendKeys(Keys.ENTER) works.

Answer 3

The page has not loaded properly when you are clicking on it. Check for different elements on the page to be sure that the page has loaded.

Also, wait for the link to appear and be visible before you click on it.

Answer 4

Try this:

selenium.fireEvent(ID, "keypress");

Answer 5

I had the same problem - with Selenium 1.0.12 and Firefox 5.0 ; I managed to make the automated tests work this way:

• I removed all "AndWait" commands (sometime they hang the test/browser)
• I added a pause before the click
• I added a waitForVisible after the click (usually I wait for the next html control I want to interact with on next page).

It goes like this:

• waitForVisible OK
• pause 1000
• click OK
• waitForVisible link=Go
• pause 1000
• click Go

etc...

It seems that the "waitForVisible" is triggered too soon, i.e. before the event handler are plugged into the control (thus clicking on the control has no effect). If you wait for 1 second, it's enought to plug/activate the click handlers...

Answer 6

If you're using FireFox, make sure you're using 3.6 or later. WaitForPageToLoad uses the javascript variable 'readyState', but Firefox only supported this in 3.6. Earlier versions just don't wait

(see org.openqa.selenium.internal.seleniumemulation.WaitForPageToLoad)