Ruby Cucumber: Selenium Webdirver - IE 11 link flashes, cannot click on - ruby

Question

I am experiencing IE browser links flashing issue when I run test automation written in Ruby Cucumber using Selenium WebDriver.
Scenario: Navigating to Reporting home page.
Given I see menu Reporting available.
When I navigate to "Annual Reporting".
Then I see the correct header on Annual Reporting page.
home_page.rb (Approach 1: using page_object)
link(:annual_reporting_link, :id => 'annualReportingLinkId')
def go_to_reporting
mouse_over_home
wait_until(5) do
annual_reporting_link
end
end
Result: Could not click on the link because of the link flashing.
Then I tried the following (Approach 2: Using send_keys)
#browser.find_element(:id, 'annualReportingLinkId').send_keys :return
and
#browser.find_element(:id, 'annualReportingLinkId').send_keys(KEYS.ENTER)
but it did not work either. I am getting this error when run the test:
Selenium::WebDriver::Error::ElementNotVisibleError: Cannot click on element
The HTML:
<div id="homeMenu">
<ul>
<li class="has-sub"><a class="homeButton" href="/report-web"></a>
<ul id="homeLinks">
<li id="report1LiId"><span id="report1LinkName" class="disabledLinksText">Report 1</span></li>
<li id="report2Id"><span id="report2LinkName" class="disabledLinksText">Report 2</span></li>
<li id="annualLiId"><span id="annualReportingLinkName">Annual Reporting</span></li>
<li id="administrationLiId"><span id="administrationLinkName" class="disabledLinksText">Manage Users</span></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
Test automation is able to expend the home menu, which contains sub-menus - hyperlinks. But after mouse_over_home (the home menu), the sub-menu started flashing. I need to click on "annual_reporting_link" to go to this reporting page, but because of flashing, the test automation cannot click on it at all.
Anyone has a solution that worked for you? Please share your solution.
Environment:
Ruby: 1.9.3
Cucumber: 2.1.0
Selenium Webdriver: 2.53.4
page-object: 1.2.0
IE: 11

Answer 1

I've had this issue before using Selenium Webdriver and IE. I found that it was a bug between my version of IE and Selenium Webdriver.
When I experienced this problem, I put a break-point before the link was clicked and debugged the test, I then manually tried to click the link in IE and I was still unable to do so 9 times out of 10 because of this bug, the link was simply ''flashing'' and unresponsive.
I'd recommend upgrading your version of Selenium Webdriver to version 3.0.0, that should fix the problem.
If you don't want to make the jump to Selenium Webdriver 3.0.0, You need find out the exact version of IE 11 you're using. Try to upgrade or downgrade your version of IE 11, this should also fix the problem, but you may find you're stuck on a version of IE 11 until you upgrade to Selenium Webdriver 3.0.0.
Antoher solution is to set the persistent hovers to false within your IE profile, something like this:
profile = Selenium::WebDriver::IE::Profile.new
profile['enablePersistentHover'] = false
driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for :IE, :profile => profile