I absolutely cannot get this xpath to work... selecting a radio button

Question

I have been trying for days to select this button... I've tried xpaths by ID type, input type, child of, etc. What am I missing here, why is VS unable to locate the "element" ? I can use the same command to ID and click a radio button on something such as FB or another site... (Bear with me, I'm newish to automation and making an attempt at self-teaching)

Message: OpenQA.Selenium.NoSuchElementException : no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"xpath","selector":".//input[@id='q1_1']"} (Session info: chrome=80.0.3987.87)

  //radio button, if I can actually get this to work....
        driver.FindElement(By.XPath(".//input[@id='q1_1']")).Click();

Answer 1

The xpath that you currently have will look for element with tag input and id q1_1 from the current node.

driver.FindElement(By.XPath(".//input[@id='q1_1']")).Click()

So , if you have executed some scripts and the current focus is on any tag after the input tag , then

".//input[@id='q1_1']" 

will not return any element .

So instead of

".//input[@id='q1_1']" 

Use:

"//input[@id='q1_1']"  // removed the dot at the starting

The above locator will look for input tag with the specified Id , starting from the root , unlike your case where it searched only from the current node.

Answer 2

Please go through a Select class, it should work

 // Select By Class
  Select Radiobutton = new Select(driver.findElement(By.id("q1_1")));
  Radiobutton.selectByValue("1");
  Radiobutton.selectByIndex(1);
  Thread.sleep(3000);

Please go through type attribute, it also works

`(By.cssSelector("input[type='radio']")).click();