Unable to select element when element is in span than select Selenium c#

Question

I am trying to select an element from dropdown with text as Ad. My page has a telerik dropdown and this is the HTML Code.

I am running following code:

SelectElement IDdropdown = new SelectElement(driver.FindElement(TrackingEnrityID_Dropdown));
IDdropdown.SelectByText("Ad");

and throws this runtime error:

An exception of type 'OpenQA.Selenium.Support.UI.UnexpectedTagNameException' occurred in WebDriver.Support.dll but was not handled in user code

Additional information: Element should have been select but was span

Answer 1

The problem is the element you are working on is NOT embedded in a select tag, so you can't use Select class on that element. When you use a Select class, a check is made that the given element is, indeed, a SELECT tag. If it is not, then an UnexpectedTagNameException is thrown.

So, what you can do is:

1. Identify the locator for the element.
2. Perform a click on the element.
3. identify the locator for the element from the dropdown and click on the required element. You can't use any of the select class methods like select_by_index or by select_by_visible_text etc.