selenium clear() command doesn't clear the element

Question

I have been writing selenium scripts for a while in Java. I encountered a very weird issue today.

Here is the issue: I cleared a text field using webelement.clear()

Answer 1

I had a similar issue with a text field that used an auto-complete plugin. I had to explicitly clear the attribute value as well as do a SendKeys. I created an extension method to encapsulate the behaviour, hopefully the snippet below will help:

public static void SendKeysAutocomplete(this IWebElement element, string fieldValue)
{
   element.SendKeys(fieldValue);
   element.SetAttribute("value", fieldValue);
}

public static void SetAttribute(this IWebElement element, string attributeName, string attributeValue)
{
   var driver = WebDriverHelper.GetDriverFromScenarioContext();

   var executor = (IJavaScriptExecutor)driver;
   executor.ExecuteScript("arguments[0].setAttribute(arguments[1], arguments[2]);", element, attributeName, attributeValue);
}