CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonselenium
godpleasehelp
godpleasehelp

Reputation: 97

What's the best way to retrieve data from a drop down menu using Selenium in Python?

I'm trying to iterate through web elements, find elements with an expandable menu, then save that information in the menu. Here's my code:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
import time

#open chrome tab
driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Chrome/Application/chromedriver.exe')

#open the url
driver.get('https://app.smartsheet.com/sheets/Phfqpp2qpvrfjw9jPggm8fRfWgqgj2mgXv5xjh71?view=grid')

#find email input box
email = driver.find_element_by_xpath('/html/body/table/tbody/tr[1]/td[2]/form/div[2]/div[3]/div[2]/div/table/tbody/tr[1]/td/div/table/tbody/tr[1]/td/input')

#type username
email.send_keys('USERNAME')
email.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

time.sleep(1)

#find password input box
password = driver.find_element_by_xpath('/html/body/table/tbody/tr[1]/td[2]/form/div[2]/div[3]/div[2]/div/table/tbody/tr[1]/td/div/table/tbody/tr[2]/td/input')

#type password
password.send_keys('PASSWORD')
password.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

time.sleep(12)

#find activity log button
activity_log = driver.find_element_by_xpath('/html/body/div[1]/div[1]/div[2]/div[3]/div[5]/div[3]/div/div/button[6]')

#click the activity log button
activity_log.click()

time.sleep(1)

#find input box for start date
start_date = driver.find_element_by_xpath('/html/body/div[1]/div[6]/div/div[1]/div[1]/span[1]/div[3]/input')

#type in necessary date
start_date.clear()
start_date.send_keys('06/07/21')

#apply the date change
apply = driver.find_element_by_xpath('/html/body/div[1]/div[6]/div/div[1]/div[1]/span[1]/span[6]/div/div')

apply.click()

#find drop down menu carets
entries = driver.find_elements_by_class_name('clsHistoryItemCaret')

This signs into my account and opens up the activity log correctly, which contains the data I need. However, it falls apart when I try to find the expandable items by class name. This is the HTML view of the button that drops down the menu with the information I need.

HTML View of Activity Log

The class name search isn't finding any elements. So, I was wondering if there was something wrong I was doing or, better yet, there's a more efficient way to do this.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 155

Answers (1)

Jeremy Kahan
Jeremy Kahan

Reputation: 3826

The issue was that the dropdown was not loaded yet after the click, and adding a time.sleep afterwards allowed the web elements to be found.

Rather than sleep, you may want to find a good locator for the close button and wait for it to be present. Those sleeps start to add up.

You may want to start using expressions like:

wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, 'your xpath here'))).click()

where EC was imported as

from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

and wait was set up with

wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 15)

Upvotes: 2

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