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Challenges in Testing Dynamic HTML Elements with Selenium in a React App

πŸ‘€ Views: 87 πŸ’¬ Answers: 1 πŸ“… Created: 2025-09-24
selenium react testing JavaScript

I keep running into I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I've been banging my head against this for hours. I'm upgrading from an older version and This might be a silly question, but During a recent code review for a React application that's heavily reliant on dynamic HTML elements, I noticed some inconsistencies in how our automated tests handle these elements... Specifically, the page contains multiple buttons that are conditionally rendered based on user interactions, which makes it tricky for Selenium to locate them consistently. I tried using both XPath and CSS Selectors to identify these buttons. Here’s an example of what I implemented: ```javascript const button = await driver.findElement(By.xpath("//button[contains(text(), 'Submit')]")); ``` While this worked in some cases, I found that the buttons often weren't available in the DOM when the tests executed due to timing issues. To address this, I added explicit waits: ```javascript const wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 10); const button = await wait.until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By.xpath("//button[contains(text(), 'Submit')]"))); ``` Even with these adjustments, there are instances where the tests still fail intermittently. It's frustrating because it seems tied to how React batches updates. I'm curious if anyone has dealt with similar issues when testing dynamic content with Selenium. Any recommendations on best practices to ensure reliability, especially when it comes to waiting for elements that are conditionally rendered? Additionally, I explored using React Testing Library alongside Jest to create more robust unit tests for our components, but I’m unsure how to integrate these tests into our existing Selenium suite without introducing complexity. Has anyone successfully merged these methodologies in a way that enhances test reliability? Is there a better approach? Is this even possible? The project is a service built with Javascript. Any feedback is welcome! Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks for any help you can provide!