Common problems with Selenium: cannot find elements due to page not loading fast enough
(With massive apologies to everyone that attended my talk, I totally failed to teach the ``implicitly_wait`` api correctly, how embarassing!)
You may occasionally see errors like this:
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'text'
In this case, I was trying to look at body.text to check whether a page contained some text. What goes wrong is that, sometimes, selenium tries to look at the page before it's finished loading. Thankfully, there's a solution: the implicitly_wait function
It should be called like this:
self.browser.implicitly_wait(3)
where self.browser is a webdriver instance, the implicitly_wait is a function call (not an attribute!). The parameter is in seconds.
Once you've set that, selenium will automatically keep polling for up to 3 seconds, if it can't find a DOM element you're asking for.
More info at:
