Question

I have a div with a unique ID. Under that div are a bunch of span elements that have className=foo. There are several span elements with className=foo but they are unique to each div (if that’s clear). So my Selenium code first gets the unique div as a web element then tries to take that element and get by class name the span like so

element = sDriver.findElement(By.id("c_"+cID)); 
String sTest = element.findElement(By.className("actions")).getText();

On the second line it throws an exception every time

org.openqa.selenium.StaleElementReferenceException: Element not found in the cache - perhaps the page has changed since it was looked up
Command duration or timeout: 22 milliseconds

Do I misunderstand how to get that span from under a unique div?

Answer 1

Nope you’right accessing the span but the problem is that the Dom has changed since StaleReferenceException is about (see StaleReferenceException )

This may be caused because the page isn’t loaded completely when the code starts or changes when the code is executed. You can either try to wait a little longer for the element or catch the StaleReferenceException and try again finding the div and the span.