Selenium webdriver can't find button - ajax

Question

EDIT:
I have cleaned this up a bit.
I have a button that looks like this:
<input id="applyRuleButton" class="Button" name="filtersContainer:applyRuleButton"
value="Apply" onclick="wicketShow('applyRuleButton--ajax-indicator');var
wcall=wicketSubmitFormById('id256', '?wicket:interface=:23:form:filtersContainer:applyRuleButton:
:IActivePageBehaviorListener:0:&wicket:ignoreIfNotActive=true',
'filtersContainer:applyRuleButton' ,function() { ;wicketHide('applyRuleButton--
ajax-indicator');}.bind(this),function() { ;wicketHide('applyRuleButton--
ajax-indicator');}.bind(this), function() {return
Wicket.$$(this)&&Wicket.$$('id256')}.bind(this));;; return false;" type="submit">
Firebug:
<input id="applyRuleButton" class="Button" type="submit"
onclick="wicketShow('applyRuleButton--ajax-indicator');var
wcall=wicketSubmitFormById('id2ee',
'?wicket:interface=:29:form:filtersContainer:applyRuleButton::IActivePageBehaviorListener:0
:&wicket:ignoreIfNotActive=true', 'filtersContainer:applyRuleButton' ,function() {
;wicketHide('applyRuleButton--ajax-indicator');}.bind(this),function() {
;wicketHide('applyRuleButton--ajax-indicator');}.bind(this), function() {return
Wicket.$$(this)&&Wicket.$$('id2ee')}.bind(this));;; return false;" value="Apply"
name="filtersContainer:applyRuleButton">
I'm trying to click it and have tried pretty much everything for 2 days, webdriver does not find the element, IDE does find it:
//This was my first approach, it should work.
It works in IDE, but not Webdriver:
driver.findElement(By.id("applyRuleButton")).click();
//then perhaps this should do the trick, hint: It doesn't:
WebElement element3 = driver.findElement(By.id("applyRuleButton"));
JavascriptExecutor executor3 = (JavascriptExecutor)driver;
executor3.executeScript("arguments[0].click();", element3);
Ok, Id not working, I get it.
Then this should work at least:
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//table/tbody/tr/td/div/div/table/tbody/tr[6]/td/input[#id='applyRuleButton']")).click();
It feels like I am missing something obvious here, some help please?
Additional information:
I have added a 5 second wait, the page is completely loaded.
This button is located in a table:
The Xpath is
/html/body/div[4]/div[2]/form/div[3]/div/div/table/tbody/tr/td/div/div/table/tbody/tr[6]/td/input
Webdriver error, no matter what I throw at it, is: Unable to locate element
I have used both 'click' and 'submit', still no success.

Answer 1

I think in this case there are two possibilities :
Either there is another element having same id/xpath.
OR Element present in another iframe.

Answer 2

Is the button visible. Selenium click (latest firefox 26 and latest webdriver 2.39.0) does not sometimes implicitly scroll; Or it may not scroll it fully. So scroll it into view - Scroll Element into View with Selenium and then it should work.
Note Selenium Best Practise try to use By.Id,By.CSSSelector and if nothing gets use By.Xpath in the order of priority. ( Use the FireFinder, FireBug plugin to test XPath or CSS)

Answer 3

This might be a synchronization issue. Such issues can be solved using smart waits.
new WebDriverWait(driver, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10)).Until(ExpectedConditions.ElementExists((By.Id("applyRuleButton"))));
WebElement element3 = driver.findElement(By.id("applyRuleButton"));
And that should work perfectly fine.

Answer 4

There is absolutely nothing wrong with your selector. I just don't think you're invoking the click correctly.
Try:
driver.findElement(By.id("applyRuleButton")).click();
If this doesn't work, then you might have to invoke a WebDriverWait since you have this question marked as [ajax]

Answer 5

Could you post the entire html?
As a simple experiment, I took the html snippet that you posted and wrote a short python script that invokes selenium:
from selenium import webdriver
br = webdriver.Firefox()
br.get("put your path to snippet here")
button = br.find_element_by_id("applyRuleButton")
print button.get_attribute("name")
button.click()
br.close()
I can find the button and extract the attribute "name" which prints "filtersContainer:applyRuleButton". This is admittedly a very limited experiment, but it suggests that the issue is related to not being where you think you are on the page.

Answer 6

Try this:
driver.findElement(By.Name("filtersContainer:applyRuleButton"));
If this doesn't help, check whether this button is located in any other frame. If so, you may have to find and move your focus to that frame and then locate this button.

Answer 7

First try to identify the button by writting correct xpath using firebug, if you are able to identify button by that xpath then use that xpath while writing your script.
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[# type='submit' and # id='applyRuleButton'")).click();
This is ajax application use proper explicit/ webdriver wait till the button gets downloaded

Answer 8

I see that this thread is old, but I was looking at it today (Sept/2021) as I was having the same problem: I could see the name / id/ type of the button, but it would never be found.
I discovered that when I had clicked in a prior link, it opened a new tab in my browser, but Selenium did not change the focus to the new tab, so it couldn't find the ID of the button I was looking for.
I solved it with :
driver.find_element_by_id("export").click() #driver
time.sleep(2)
driver.switch_to.window(driver.window_handles[1]) # Change focus to the new tab
driver.find_element_by_id("0001btn").click() #click
driver.close() #close new tab

Answer 9

switching to a specific frame helped me to resolve the same issue. (python + selenium)
I installed the Selenium Recorder extension on chrome and recorded my steps, and found out that the recorder had a step to select a frame = 0, so adding
self.home_page.driver.switch_to.frame(0)
self.home_page.click_on_element_by_id("clickSubmit")
solved the problem.