Selenium WebDriver StaleElementReferenceException

I ran across this same problem and could not find any solutions. Came up with a solution and posting it here, hope this helps someone with the same problem. I created a class to handle stale elements depending on their type, cssselector, id, etc and simply call it like I would any other page object.

public void StaleElementHandleByID (String elementID)
{
    int count = 0;
    boolean clicked = false;
    while (count < 4 && !clicked)
    {
        try 
        {
            WebElement yourSlipperyElement= driver.findElement(By.id(elementID));
            yourSlipperyElement.click(); 
            clicked = true;
        } 
        catch (StaleElementReferenceException e)
        {
            e.toString();
            System.out.println("Trying to recover from a stale element :" + e.getMessage());
            count = count+1;
        }
    }
}

I'd recommend only using this on elements you know cause problems for WebDriver.

We get around this issue by doing something called WebdriverWrapper and WebElementWrapper.

What these wrappers do is handle the StaleElementException within and then use the locator to re-evaluate and get the new WebElement object. This way, you need to spread the code handling the exception all over your codebase and localize it to one class.

I will look into open sourcing just these couple of classes soon and add a link here if you folk are interested.

That exception is thrown when you try to use a method of a WebElement that is not longer on the page. If your grid is dynamically loading data and you refresh the grid, any references to elements on that grid would be 'stale'. Double check that the element you're trying to reference is on the page in your tests, and you may need to re-instantiate the object.

It also encountered this issue, It looks very obvious the modal panel loading falls into a race condition and keeps waiting till time out.

I have tried many times, and found the solution is to hold the modal panel loading till it can be exactly found by webDriver and at the same time keep refresh the webDriver instance , then try to find WebElements within the modal panel.

So the solution is like follows: e.g. MyModalPanel is your ModalPanel Id, then do the following

page.openModalPanel();
Assert.assertTrue(page.waitTillDisplay( "MyModalPanelContentDiv"), Wait.MODAL_PANEL));
page.fillInFormInModalpanel(formObj);

and the waitTillDisplay code can be found on WebDriver website, I will just paste my code here for your reference:

public Boolean waitTillDisplay(final String id, int waitSeconds){

    WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, waitSeconds);
        Boolean displayed = wait.until(new ExpectedCondition<Boolean>() {
              public Boolean apply(WebDriver driver) {
                  return driver.findElement(By.id(id)).isDisplayed();
              }

        });
        return displayed;

}

You might be trying to get any of element properties after clicking an element.

I had the same issue, I was trying to getText() of button after it was clicked. In my case, once button is clicked, new window comes.