I wrote automation code to click on a date from a data picker but its not working

Question

Website : https://www.abhibus.com/

I am trying to automate selecting date of journey on the website above. Nothing I have tried is working.

Screenshot of the date selector

Code I am using

 WebDriverWait wait2=new WebDriverWait(driver,5);
 WebElement startdate = wait2.until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.xpath("//table[@class='ui-datepicker-calendar']//td[@data-month='9']//a[.='22']"))); 
     startdate.click();

Error message:

no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"xpath","selector":"//table[@class='ui-datepicker-calendar']//td[@data-month='9']//a[.='22']"}

Answer 1

Try like below and confirm:

driver.get("https://www.abhibus.com/");
WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver,30);
        
// Click on the "Date of journey"
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By.id("datepicker1"))).click();
        
// try to click on the date since past dates will be disabled.
try {
    wait.until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By.xpath("//div[@id='ui-datepicker-div']/div[1]//a[text()='27' and not(contains(@class,'disabled'))]"))).click();
    System.out.println("Selected date");
}catch (TimeoutException e){
    System.out.println("Invalid date");
}

Answer 2

You made the mistake of writing you automation without taking your domain into consideration. Let look at your selector

//table[@class='ui-datepicker-calendar']//td[@data-month='9']//a[.='22'] 

The first part is absolutely fine, you go straight and root yourself in the interesting sub component. On the second value, you define that september (data-month=9) will always be available, which it isn't since your application under test doesn't give data attributes to disabled fields but marks them just as

ui-datepicker-unselectable

If you just exchange the "9" in your selector for a 10, it will work again.

Of course you might not want to have an automation that needs to be fixed every month, since the change of a month is a quite predictable event so if you want to select the 22nd of the current month you might wanna try something along the lines of

LocalDate currentdate = LocalDate.now();
String selector = "//table[@class='ui-datepicker-calendar']//td[@data-month='"+currentdate.getMonth()+"']//a[.='22']"
 WebDriverWait wait2=new WebDriverWait(driver,5);
 WebElement startdate = wait2.until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.xpath(selector))); 
 startdate.click();

which would insert the current month into your selector. If that isn't your intended behaviour, you might want to actually define a function to construct your selector according to your specification.