ElementNotVisibleException error in Python/Selenium

Question

I'm getting this error when I run this Python/Selenium script.

File "./a.py", line 21, in <module>
elem = driver.find_element_by_id("licensees").click()
 raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.ElementNotVisibleException: Message: 

Here is the html code

<p>
 <button onClick="myloginwindow1('')" value="Login Now" name="licensees" id="licensees">
 <p>Licensee Login</p>
</button> 
</p>

Here is the code.

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
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("https://xxxxx.com")
assert "xxxxxxxx" in driver.title
try:
element = WebDriverWait(driver, 30).until(
 EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, "licensees"))
)
elem = driver.find_element_by_id("licensees").click()
finally:
 driver.quit()

When I remove

elem = driver.find_element_by_id("licensees").click()

I don't get an error.

Answer 1

You can also execute the script that's executed when clicking the button. This way you won't need to wait for the element to be clickable.

 driver.execute_script(
 "myloginwindow1('')"
 )

Answer 2

Use visibilityOfElementLocated instead of presence_of_element_located

presenceOfElementLocated don't care whether if element visible or not, It just checks element is on the page

try:
 WebDriverWait(driver, 60).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.ID, "licensees"))).click()

Answer 3

As mentioned elsewhere, presence is different than visibility.

But with capybara-py, you don’t have to think about either:

from capybara.dsl import page
page.visit("...")
page.assert_title("...")
page.click_button("Licensee Login")

Here, click_button() waits for the button to be interactable.

(Similarly, assert_title() waits for the title to match, in case, e.g., the page takes a while to fully load.)