Stale Element when using PageFactory – Selenium

Hello guys,

The first post of the year will be a quick one. Took me a while to figure out since it has been ages I coded in Selenium/Java and used PageFactory (which I thought was deprecated, but it is just deprecated in C#)

If you ever come across an error like this when using PageFactory:

stale element reference: element is not attached to the page document

PageFactory initializes the elements the first time you run the automation and when the page changes (which happens on Angular and React pages) Selenium loses the reference to that element and needs to find it again with the new DOM.

You can do something like this:

protected void clickElement(WebElement element) {
   try {
      webDriverUtils.waitForElementToBePresent(element);
      element.click();
   } catch (StaleElementReferenceException e) {
       PageFactory.initElements(driver, this);
   }