Question

The problem:

.Click()-ing a radio button webdriver element stales it(no control over the page that does this). The DOM element itself is still the same.

The goal:

I want to reset the existing webdriver element using its own original selector method so that it is no longer stale. I want a general solution that does not require knowing ahead of time how the element was found. I want to use the existing stale element to do the work. Ideal case would look something like this(using the following C# extension method just for sake of example):

IWebElement refreshedElement = driver.FindElement(staleElement.By());

The question:

Is there a way to expose the existing elements location? Is the ‘address’ of the element available anywhere? It doesn’t even have to be the original method of addressing the element when it was found, I don’t care about that. I’d just rather not have to make a subclass just to capture this information.

Answer 1

No, Selenium does not keep track of ‘how’ you found an element, and frankly I don’t think that should be Selenium’s responsibility.

I would wrap it into a new class, which inherits from RemoteWebElement, and has a method called RefindElement.