Blog: InvalidSelectorException has changed

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Before Selenium 4.8.2 in Java and C#, when an invalid locator was used to identify an element, the resulting behavior would be inconsistent in our bindings.

For example, let’s check the following code:

ArrayList<Class<? extends Exception>> expectedExceptions = new ArrayList<>();
 expectedExceptions.add(org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchElementException.class);
 expectedExceptions.add(org.openqa.selenium.StaleElementReferenceException.class);
 expectedExceptions.add(org.openqa.selenium.ElementNotInteractableException.class);
 expectedExceptions.add(org.openqa.selenium.InvalidElementStateException.class);

return new FluentWait<>(driver)
 .withTimeout(Duration.ofMillis(ELEMENT_IDENTIFICATION_TIMEOUT))
 .pollingEvery(Duration.ofMillis(ELEMENT_IDENTIFICATION_POLLING_DELAY))
 .ignoreAll(expectedExceptions)
 .until(nestedDriver -> {
 nestedDriver.findElement(By.xpath("invalid-xpath")).click;
 });

The expected result before this change would be that the driver waits until the timeout expires and then throw an InvalidSelectorException.

This doesn’t make much sense because a broken/invalid selector would never fix itself, and hence should throw immediately.

This was discussed and agreed during the TLC meeting on August 17, 2022, and implemented through the pull request 11727 and the following commit.

With the changes mentioned above, an invalid selector will throw an InvalidSelectorException immediately.

Please note that this may have an impact on backwards compatibility if you are not expecting this exception to be thrown while handling invalid locators.

Stay tuned for updates by following SeleniumHQ!

Happy testing!

Selenium – exceptions

Blog: InvalidSelectorException has changed