Clicking on <li> list item not using Selenium Java

Question

The following list represents page navigation buttons:

<div class="list">
 <ul class="pageNav">
  <li class="paginate_button ">
   <a href="#" controls="Tables_Table_0" data-idx="0" tabindex="0">1</a></li>
  <li class="paginate_button ">
   <a href="#" controls="Tables_Table_0" data-idx="1" tabindex="0">2</a></li>
  <li class="paginate_button ">
   <a href="#" controls="Tables_Table_0" data-idx="2" tabindex="0">3</a></li>
 </ul>
</div>

To go to the second page for instance, I am using this Selenium Java code:

//after setting up webdriver
List<WebElement> li = driver.findElements(By.className("pageNav"));
System.out.println(li.get(2).getText());
li.get(2).click();

It's printing the text correctly "2", but not clicking or navigating correctly as if I was manually doing it on the actual website. I also tried replacing the link with an actual link like: <a href="https://www.w3schools.com/html/">Visit our page</a>

But still no luck. What am I doing wrong?

Thank you in advanced!

You're clicking on the "<li>" element, but you should click on it's "<a>" child element. — racraman
– racraman, Commented Apr 7, 2017 at 3:07

Jainish Kapadia · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-07 05:24:02Z

1

Try any of these below code.

In your tried code, I have noticed that you were using class locator to click on links element. But your <ul> tag does not contains the link. Inside <ul> tag, <li> tag is present and each <li> tag contains separate <a> tag.

so, here you should go with xpath or cssSelector locator.

Method 1) By using xpath locator

List<WebElement> links = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//ul[@class='pageNav']/li/a"));
System.out.println(links.size());

links.get(1).click(); //indexing start from 0, if you want to click on second link then pass indexing as 1.

Suggestion:- Instead of using absolute xpath, use relative xpath.

Method 2) By using cssSelector locator

List<WebElement> links = driver.findElements(By.cssSelector("ul.pageNav>li>a"));
System.out.println(links.size());

links.get(1).click(); //indexing start from 0, if you want to click on second link then pass indexing as 1.

edited Apr 7, 2017 at 5:24

answered Apr 7, 2017 at 5:07

Jainish Kapadia

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Comments

Akarsh · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-07 04:07:09Z

1

Try below code

    //getting all the anchor tag elements and storing in a list

    List<WebElement> links = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//ul[@class='pageNav']//li[starts-with(@class,'paginate_button')]/a"));
    System.out.println(links.size());

    //performs click on second links
    links.get(1).click();

answered Apr 7, 2017 at 4:07

Akarsh

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Comments

Kushal Bhalaik · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-07 07:31:08Z

1

If you're facing any abnormal difficulty which you are not able to handle directly , then you can first try to move to that element using actions class then click it as below:

 WebElement we = driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("div.list > ul.pageNav li:nth-child(2));
 Actions action = new Actions(driver);
 action.moveToElement(we).click().build().perform();

edited Apr 7, 2017 at 7:31

answered Apr 7, 2017 at 5:56

Kushal Bhalaik

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