Selenium Would Be Great If I Didn't Have To Design Around It, Part 2
So, last time, I dug into how Selenium blows up if you ask it for something that doesn't exist. I mean, how dare I, the tester, want to care about things that don't exist? If we asked about all the things that don't exist, we'd never have time to play ping pong. Never the less, we are asked to test these nasty requirements about security and privacy and some times you really don't want to show private data to every user that hits your page. So, here we are. Today's Selenium sin is the Stale Element Exception. This is a thing that should never exist. To even understand why it exists, you need to stew yourself in a bath of object references and multi-process timing. That, my friends, is a bath you do not want to sit in. Let me do my best to give an example of why we might see this problem. Let's say you have a web application that displays a dialog to edit a user. You want to make sure a certain user property is displayed on a couple users on the edit ...