How to identify the web-element for a Text Box using Selenium

Question

I am attempting to locate the empty textbox by the input id 'Department_input'

<input id="Department_input" type="text" aria-required="true" size="40" class="field_input ui-widget-content" maxlength="15" aria-invalid="false">

Using driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@id='Department_input']") without luck(returning no such element error). There are multiple text boxes on the form that I'd like to enter into also.

Is there another way to approach this?

Answer 1

Most probably this occurs because of the execution speed. The code executes before loading the page. Therefore when the code looks for an element with the id='Department_input' it cant find such element and throws exception.

First of all try a Thread.sleep(5000) just before where you look for the element.

Thread.sleep(5000);    
driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@id='Department_input']");     

This will pause the execution for 5 seconds and continue. If it works for you try using page factory.
It's better if you use like this since you have ID of the element,

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("Department_input"));     

page-object-pattern-model-page-factory 1

page-object-pattern-model-page-factory 2

Check these 2 tutorials. It will help to understand. Both are for the same task.

Answer 2

try the below:

from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait # available since 2.4.0
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC # available since 2.26.0


WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, 'Department_input')))

Answer 3

When you land up on the page then first verify if u have landed on required page. Since u are getting no such element, it may be possible that element is not loaded by the time your code has reached to that location. So please try to add some wait before reaching to the element. it should work