How Do I Click All Elements in Selenium Webdriver?

Question

Updated

I'm using:

Selenium 2.53.1
Firefox and IE11

I've been trying to click on all elements with the same selector, for example, I want to click on all the ones with the title "What I Want":

<div id="first_question"> <a class="gibberish1" title="What I Want"></a> <a class="gibberish2" title="What I Want"></a> <a class="gibberish3" title="What I Want"></a> </div>

Here is what I have working so far:

browser.findElements(by.xpath("//a[@title='What I Want']")).then(function(all_tests){ for (var i = 0; i < all_tests.length; i++) { console.log(all_tests.length); all_tests[i].click(); } });

It's able to recognize that I have three elements, and if I call each individual one directly then I'm able to see it click on the button. However, when I want to loop so it clicks on each button, I get an error:

"StaleElementReferenceError: Element is no longer attached to the DOM."

I also added a wait of 5 seconds in, but that didn't deter the same issue from popping up.

What am I doing wrong? I'm new to Selenium and I'm trying to figure this out in Javascript, instead of Java which is what I find examples for this situation.

I don't do javascript so I don't know the syntax but the last attempt with the for loop looks the closest. The issue is that you are clicking a collection rather than just a single element. In your for loop, you want something like all_tests[i].click() so you click the loop instance. — JeffC
– JeffC, Commented Jun 28, 2017 at 15:05
Hi @JeffC, you're right. I changed it to. It's just now that I'm getting the StaleElementError issue that I commented on below, and I'm trying to work through that. — Lucia
– Lucia, Commented Jun 28, 2017 at 15:29
I think first print the all_tests, check the output and the changes in the for loop could work........................................ for element in all_tests: element.click() .........................and to handle StaleElementReferenceError, can check here: stackoverflow.com/questions/27003423/… — Vishal Kumar
– Vishal Kumar, Commented Oct 16, 2019 at 12:57

lauda · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-28 15:07:38Z

1

You need to find them one by one, on page reload your objects will be lost and you will get stale element exception.

1) find all links
2) save an attribute/attributes in a list/array that can help you identify each link
3) create a loop where for each attribute you are searching for the element and click it

answered Jun 28, 2017 at 15:07

lauda

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2 Comments

JeffC Over a year ago

This is an additional concern but this doesn't answer the question. This really only applies if the hyperlinks reload the page or navigate to a new one. There's nothing in the question currently to indicate either of those are happening or are related to the issue.

Lucia Over a year ago

@JeffC It seems that when I select the attribute, it's refreshing the DOM because I get a "StaleElementReferenceError: Element is no longer attached to the DOM" now.

JeffC · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-28 15:47:06Z

Moving my comment to an answer...

The first issue is that your code attempts are clicking a collection rather than an individual element. There are several ways to do this, one of which is doing a for loop and accessing the individual elements inside the loop, e.g. all_tests[i].click();.
The second issue with stale elements is because the DOM is being changed either through refreshing the page or navigating to a new page. If the issue is that clicking is causing navigation, you can loop through all the A tags and store the hrefs in a string array. Then you can loop through that string array and navigate to each stored href, etc.

Another way to handle this is to scrape the page using the index rather than storing the collection outside the loop. A simple example of this is

This is Java/pseudocode that you will have to translate into whatever language you are using but the concept should work.
```
for (int i = 0; i < driver.findElements(locator).length; i++) { // scrapes the page each iteration to avoid the stale element exception driver.findElements(locator)[i].click(); // do stuff and get back to the original page, if navigated } 
```

Vishal Kumar · Accepted Answer · 2019-10-16 13:06:27Z

I think first print the all_tests, check the output and the changes in the for loop could work

for element in all_tests: element.click()

And to handle StaleElementReferenceError, can check here:
StaleElementReferenceException on Python Selenium

NOTE: Not Tested but handled the same concern.

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