Selenium2 Selecting an item, that apperas on a page occasionally

Question

I am a Software tester who has a very basic knowledge of java and Selenium2. I am trying to write a Junit Selenium2 test to click on an item if it appears on the page.(The majority of the time this item should not appear) if it is not there then i would like the code to just click an alternative item. I have tried using an if else statement. My code is shown below.When i execute the code it just results in an error.(NoSuchElementException) because it can't find the id "house". plwease could someone help.

@Test
 public void testMyLoop() throws Exception {
    if (driver.findElement(By.id("house")).isDisplayed()) {
        driver.findElement(By.id("house")).sendKeys("test");
    } else {
        driver.findElement(By.linkText("Garage")).click();
    }
}

Answer 1

Your immediate problem is that Selenium throws an exception when it fails to find an element whose id is "house". Here are two ways to get past that problem: you can either catch the NoSuchElementException like this:

@Test
public void testMyLoop() throws Exception {
  boolean houseDisplayed = false;
  try {
     WebElement e = driver.findElement(By.id("house"));
     houseVisible = e.isDisplayed();
   }
   catch (NoSuchElementException ex) {}
   if (houseDisplayed) {
     driver.findElement(By.id("house")).sendKeys("test");
   }   else  {
     driver.findElement(By.linkText("Garage")).click();
   }
}

or you can replace findElement with a different method that does not throw a NoSuchElementException:

@Test
public void testMyLoop() throws Exception {
  boolean houseDisplayed = false;
  List<WebElement> elist = driver.findElements(By.id("house"));
  if (elist.count() == 1) {
     WebElement house = elist.get(0);
     houseDisplayed = house.isDisplayed();
  }
  if (houseDisplayed) {
     driver.findElement(By.id("house")).sendKeys("test");
   }   else  {
     driver.findElement(By.linkText("Garage")).click();
   }
}

Caveat: these code fragments may not compile as is and can be written in a cleaner way, but I hope they illustrate how to get past your immediate problem.

I have not seen the HTML for your page, so I cannot offer an opinion about whether you are identifying the house and Garage elements correctly.