Using selenium to refresh a page causing StaleElementReferenceException error

Question

I have a python script that uses selenium. The steps of the script is:

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Go to a page which starts a file harvester process
After every 1 minute refresh the status page to check if the file harvester has completed - which is indicated in a table on the page

The problem that I am having is that when the page is refreshed using browser.refresh() I get the following error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\ScheduledTasks\Scripts\ScriptArchive\COL_INSPIRE\INSPIRE_METADATA_v1.1.py", line 491, in <module>
    print head.text
  File "C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.2\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.44.0-py2.7.egg\selenium\webdriver\remote\webelement.py", line 61, in text
    return self._execute(Command.GET_ELEMENT_TEXT)['value']
  File "C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.2\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.44.0-py2.7.egg\selenium\webdriver\remote\webelement.py", line 385, in _execute
    return self._parent.execute(command, params)
  File "C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.2\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.44.0-py2.7.egg\selenium\webdriver\remote\webdriver.py", line 173, in execute
    self.error_handler.check_response(response)
  File "C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.2\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.44.0-py2.7.egg\selenium\webdriver\remote\errorhandler.py", line 166, in check_response
    raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
StaleElementReferenceException: Message: Element not found in the cache - perhaps the page has changed since it was looked up

This used to work, but now the above error is appearing, what is the best way to to "poll" a page to check whether a piece of text has changed.

My code is

header = browser.find_elements(By.TAG_NAME,"tr")
#go through each header to get teh one we want
headerIndex = 0
for head in header:

 #print headerIndex
 print head.text
 if "Next harvest" in head.text:
    #Get the table data for the header that we want
    tdata = header[headerIndex].find_elements(By.TAG_NAME,"td")
    for t in tdata:
       print t.text
       if "Scheduled" in t.text:
          #wait 60 seconds
          time.sleep(60)
          browser.refresh()
       elif "Not yet scheduled" in t.text:
          refreshComplete = True
          break
 if refreshComplete == True:
    break
 headerIndex = headerIndex + 1

alecxe · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-24 17:26:22Z

2

You have to find the headers every time you refresh the page.

I would also switching to using find_element(s)_by_xpath to check the text:

while True:
    header = browser.find_element_by_xpath('//tr[contains(., "Next harvest")]')

    not_scheduled = header.find_elements_by_xpath('//td[contains(., "Not yet scheduled")]')
    if not_scheduled:
        break

    time.sleep(60)
    browser.refresh()

Hope you've got the idea behind the solution (but check if I've followed the logic correctly).

answered Mar 24, 2015 at 17:26

alecxe

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1 Comment

MapMan Over a year ago

Thanks, using find_element_by_xpath worked and your code is a lot cleaner than mine, So thanks!!!

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