How to click a dynamic link with in a drupal 8 website using xpath/css selector while automating through Selenium and Python

Question

I am trying to click on an edit tab link, and its in the form of a hyperlink in an unordered list.

Here is the HTML:

<li><a href="/node/2658/edit" data-drupal-link-system-path="node/2658/edit">Edit</a></li>

I have been trying to use driver.find_element_by_link_text('Edit') to find the element, however always get a NoSuchElementException.

I have also used the by partial text fxn, with all variations of the html, and receive the same error.

There is also the following html I found that includes the proper link:

<link rel="edit-form" href="/node/2658/edit" />

Is there a selenium function I can use to go to this edit page?

@KunduK Could you expand on that? Not familiar with what you're talking about — Michael Lively
– Michael Lively, Commented Jan 16, 2020 at 21:22
I wish I could, however it requires being logged into the dev mode of our website, so unfortunately I can't share that info... — Michael Lively
– Michael Lively, Commented Jan 16, 2020 at 21:27
No worries.If you inspect your element the EDIT element just traverse upwards in the DOM tree and check if there any tag <iframe> if there you need to switch to that iframe in oder to access. — KunduK
– KunduK, Commented Jan 16, 2020 at 21:30
Viewing the entire page source, there are no instances of <iframe> anywhere . Well... there are a couple, but none none in any relevant sections and they're always closed in the same line — Michael Lively
– Michael Lively, Commented Jan 16, 2020 at 21:33
Well the iframe tag always be start and close. However Check the answer posted by @DebanjanB Hope this will help to your resolution. — KunduK
– KunduK, Commented Jan 16, 2020 at 21:35

undetected Selenium · Accepted Answer · 2021-01-26 19:02:43Z

0

As per the HTML you shared the value of href and data-drupal-link-system-path attributes clearly seems to be dynamic due to the presence of the value 2658. So you need to construct a dynamic locator to locate the element.

As the desired element is a dynamic element so to locate and click() on the element you have to induce WebDriverWait for the element_to_be_clickable() and you can use either of the following Locator Strategies:

Using CSS_SELECTOR:

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "li>a[href$='edit'][data-drupal-link-system-path^='node']"))).click()

Using XPATH:

WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//li/a[contains(@href, 'edit') and starts-with(@data-drupal-link-system-path, 'node')][text()='Edit']"))).click()

Note : You have to add the following imports :

from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

Explanation of the dynamic CSS_SELECTOR

To consider only the static part of href and data-drupal-link-system-path attributes you can use the following wildcards in css-selectors:

$ : To indicate an attribute value ends with
^ : To indicate an attribute value starts with

So the most granular css_selector would be :

li>a[href$='edit'][data-drupal-link-system-path^='node']

Explanation of the dynamic XPATH

To consider only the static part of href and data-drupal-link-system-path attributes you can use the following functions of xpath:

contains() : To indicate an attribute value contains
starts-with() : To indicate an attribute value starts with

So the most granular xpath would be :

//li/a[contains(@href, 'edit') and starts-with(@data-drupal-link-system-path, 'node')][text()='Edit']

Reference

You can find a couple of relevant discussions in:

tl; dr

You can find a detailed discussion on NoSuchElementException in:

Selenium “selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException” when using Chrome

edited Jan 26, 2021 at 19:02

answered Jan 16, 2020 at 21:32

undetected Selenium

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2 Comments

Michael Lively Over a year ago

You sir, are a life saver. The CSS option worked perfectly. Could you explain how you came to that conclusion so quickly, I'd like to understand on a deeper level

undetected Selenium Over a year ago

@MichaelLively Updated the answer with all the relevant details and references for your deeper level understanding. Let me know if you have further queries.

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