Scroll Element into View with Selenium

Question

Is there any way in either Selenium 1.x or 2.x to scroll the browser window so that a particular element identified by an XPath is in view of the browser? There is a focus m

Answer 1

This worked for me:

IWebElement element = driver.FindElements(getApplicationObject(currentObjectName, currentObjectType, currentObjectUniqueId))[0];
 ((IJavaScriptExecutor)driver).ExecuteScript("arguments[0].scrollIntoView(true);", element);

Answer 2

The default behavior of Selenium us to scroll so the element is barely in view at the top of the viewport. Also, not all browsers have the exact same behavior. This is very dis-satisfying. If you record videos of your browser tests, like I do, what you want is for the element to scroll into view and be vertically centered.

Here is my solution for Java:

public List<String> getBoundedRectangleOfElement(WebElement we)
{
    JavascriptExecutor je = (JavascriptExecutor) driver;
    List<String> bounds = (ArrayList<String>) je.executeScript(
            "var rect = arguments[0].getBoundingClientRect();" +
                    "return [ '' + parseInt(rect.left), '' + parseInt(rect.top), '' + parseInt(rect.width), '' + parseInt(rect.height) ]", we);
    System.out.println("top: " + bounds.get(1));
    return bounds;
}

And then, to scroll, you call it like this:

public void scrollToElementAndCenterVertically(WebElement we)
{
    List<String> bounds = getBoundedRectangleOfElement(we);
    Long totalInnerPageHeight = getViewPortHeight(driver);
    JavascriptExecutor je = (JavascriptExecutor) driver;
    je.executeScript("window.scrollTo(0, " + (Integer.parseInt(bounds.get(1)) - (totalInnerPageHeight/2)) + ");");
    je.executeScript("arguments[0].style.outline = \"thick solid #0000FF\";", we);
}

Answer 3

Something that worked for me was to use the Browser.MoveMouseToElement method on an element at the bottom of the browser window. Miraculously it worked in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome.

I chose this over the JavaScript injection technique just because it felt less hacky.

Answer 4

From my experience, Selenium Webdriver doesn't auto scroll to an element on click when there are more than one scrollable section on the page (which is quite common).

I am using Ruby, and for my AUT, I had to monkey patch the click method as follows;

class Element

      #
      # Alias the original click method to use later on
      #
      alias_method :base_click, :click

      # Override the base click method to scroll into view if the element is not visible
      # and then retry click
      #
      def click
        begin
          base_click
        rescue Selenium::WebDriver::Error::ElementNotVisibleError
          location_once_scrolled_into_view
          base_click
        end
      end

The 'location_once_scrolled_into_view' method is an existing method on WebElement class.

I apreciate you may not be using Ruby but it should give you some ideas.

Answer 5

You can use the org.openqa.selenium.interactions.Actions class to move to an element.

Java:

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("my-id"));
Actions actions = new Actions(driver);
actions.moveToElement(element);
actions.perform();

Python:

from selenium.webdriver.common.action_chains import ActionChains
ActionChains(driver).move_to_element(driver.sl.find_element_by_id('my-id')).perform()

Answer 6

I've been doing testing with ADF components and you have to have a separate command for scrolling if lazy loading is used. If the object is not loaded and you attempt to find it using Selenium, Selenium will throw an element-not-found exception.