Locating element by link text (anchor tag innerHTML) or xpath fails in Selenium 2.0 Webdriver

Question

I'm using Selenium 2.0 web driver. My script keeps failing whenever I try locating something in my page. It throws an exception whether I locate the element by LinkText or by XPath.

driver.FindElement(By.LinkText("Products")).Click();

Selenium.ProductPricing.TheUntitledTest:
OpenQA.Selenium.NoSuchElementException : Unable to locate element: {"method":"link text","selector":"Products"}

driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//div[@id='nav']/ul/li[1]/a")).Click();

Selenium.ProductPricing.TheUntitledTest:
OpenQA.Selenium.NoSuchElementException : Unable to locate element: {"method":"xpath","selector":"//div[@id='nav']/ul/li[0]/a"}

Answer 1

XPath list indexes are one-based, not zero-based. Try li[1].

Answer 2

Seems like I have to use this line of code before I invoke any click events. The "clickAndWait" conversion of the Selenium IDE to Webdriver doesn't seem to work properly. It converts everything to *.Click(). Adding the implicit wait after every click event and setting WAIT_TIME to 3 in my Constants class seems to do the trick.

driver.FindElement(By.CssSelector("input[type=\"submit\"]")).Click();
driver.Manage().Timeouts().ImplicitlyWait(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(Constants.WAIT_TIME));
driver.FindElement(By.LinkText("Products")).Click();
driver.Manage().Timeouts().ImplicitlyWait(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(Constants.WAIT_TIME));

Answer 3

A few things to look at.

1. Are you sure that the LinkText is correct? Are you missing spaces, non breaking spaces, etc that may appear in the html but you don't see as a user?
2. Are you sure the xpath is correct?
3. Is this a timing issue? Are you trying to find the elements before the page is finished loading or before those elements are loaded?

Answer 4

This selenium webdriver tutorial explains how to click a link by its href: http://www.testingexcellence.com/click-link-href-value-webdriver/

Answer 5

Try either:

driver.find_element_by_xpath(u'//a[text()="Foo text"]')

or dedicated driver method:

driver.find_element_by_link_text("Foo text")

Add .click() if needed.

For troubleshooting, check this post at SO, as maybe your page isn't loaded yet, so you probably need to write a wait wrapper to wait for an element to appear.