Iterating through a table : Avoiding stale element exceptions (Webdriver - Python)

Question

Here is an interesting problem (or at least i think so) As an Admin I have a table with N entries (51 to give a number). Each entry in a row is a recruiter name with a link to 'Login' as that person. I want to be able to click on each recruiter 'login' which takes me to that account, verify some facts there, logout, Relogin as the admin and continue the cylcle (login as recruiter,verify,logout etc) I find the elements in the table by finding each row and then each cell. (find_elements_by_tag_name("tr") followed by find_elements_by_tag_name("td")).

The problem arises when I Logout as the recruiter and ReLogin as the admin, now the cells that I had found earlier throw a stale element exceptions.

for row in rows: 
    if chk == "true":
          cells[6].find_element_by_link_text("Login").click()  # recruiter login
          alert = driver.switch_to_alert()
          alert.accept()
          #Verify Recruiter account is the same as the one you logged in as
          driver.find_element_by_link_text("Logout").click()
          self.login()   #admin login
          self.bringUpRecruiters()

I could call the function which finds the rows and columns at each iteration. However, it takes half a minute for webdriver to find all the cell elements (51 rows x 7 columns) at each iteration. For 51 iterations that is approximately 25 mins. And if the number of rows increase it will only increase more.

Is there a more elegant and time saving way of doing this ? I would appreciate your bright ideas!

I am using Webdriver + Python bindings.

Answer 1

I wonder if it would be faster to use Xpaths to search specifically for cells in the row of interest, rather than fetching all rows and then manipulating the one row you are interested in. I am not fluent in Python, so I will illustrate my suggestion in pseudo-code:

for i in 1..51
  condition_xpath = "//table/tr[" + i + "]/td[1]"
  column1 = driver.find_element_by_xpath(condition_xpath)
  if condition in column 1 is true
    login_xpath = "//table/tr[" + i + "]/td[7]/a"
    driver.find_element_by_xpath(login_xpath).click()
    alert = driver.switch_to_alert()
    alert.accept()
    #Verify Recruiter account is the same as the one you logged in as
    driver.find_element_by_link_text("Logout").click()
    self.login()   #admin login
    self.bringUpRecruiters()
  end if
end for