👀 Views: 39 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-08-22

selenium webdriver jquery dropdown automation Python

This might be a silly question, but I'm experiencing an scenario where my Selenium WebDriver tests intermittently unexpected result to find and click on options in a jQuery UI multi-select dropdown. The application under test uses jQuery version 3.6.0 and the jQuery UI library for its dropdown functionality. When I attempt to interact with the dropdown, it behaves inconsistently, sometimes finding the options and other times throwing a `NoSuchElementException`. Here's the relevant code snippet I'm using: ```python from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC # Setup Chrome options options = webdriver.ChromeOptions() options.add_argument('--start-maximized') # Initialize WebDriver driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options) driver.get('http://example.com') # Wait for the dropdown to be clickable WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID, 'multi-select-dropdown'))).click() # Attempt to find and select an option try: option = WebDriverWait(driver, 5).until( EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH, '//option[text()="Option 2"]')) ) option.click() except Exception as e: print(f'behavior occurred: {e}') ``` I have tried using both the `visibility_of_element_located` and `element_to_be_clickable` conditions, but the question continues. Sometimes the option is found and clicked, but on other runs, I get the `NoSuchElementException`, which suggests that the dropdown options may not be fully rendered in the DOM before Selenium attempts to access them. I also tried adding a sleep before the interaction, but this made no difference. I'm running Chrome version 120 and ChromeDriver version 120 as well. Does anyone have insights into what might be causing this inconsistency? Any best practices for working with jQuery UI components in Selenium would also be appreciated. Is there a better approach?