Switching to a frame and back invalidates WebElement-CodePudding

This function receives a WebElement and uses it to locate other elements. But when I switch to an iframe and back, the WebElement seems to be invalidated. The error I get is "stale element reference: element is not attached to the page document".

def map_vid(vid):
    vid_name = vid.find_element(By.XPATH, "./*[1]").text

    frame = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, FRAME_XPATH)
    driver.switch_to.frame(frame)

    quality_button = driver.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, 'icon-cog')
    quality_button.click()

    driver.switch_to.default_content()

    close_button = vid.find_element(By.XPATH, CLOSE_BUTTON_XPATH)
    close_button.click()

Relocating the WebElement is not an option, since it's passed as an argument. Any help would be greatly appriciated :)

CodePudding user response：

You need to pass a By locator as a parameter instead of passing a WebElement parameter.
You can not make this your code working with passing a WebElement parameter since Selenium WebElement is a reference to physical web element on the page.
As you can see, switching to/from an iframe causes previously found WebElements to become Stale.
Passing a By locator will allow you to find the passed parent element inside the method each time you will need to use it. Something like the following:

def map_vid(vid_by):
    vid = driver.find_element(vid_by)
    vid_name = vid.find_element(By.XPATH, "./*[1]").text

    frame = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, FRAME_XPATH)
    driver.switch_to.frame(frame)

    quality_button = driver.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, 'icon-cog')
    quality_button.click()

    driver.switch_to.default_content()

    vid = driver.find_element(vid_by)
    close_button = vid.find_element(By.XPATH, CLOSE_BUTTON_XPATH)
    close_button.click()