Print locator of invisible element in the error

[php-coder]

I'm running RobotFramework test in the Travis CI and it fails:

Catalog price should reject invalid values :: Verify that fields w... | FAIL |
Several failures occurred:
1) You may only interact with visible elements
Build info: version: '2.53.1', revision: 'a36b8b1cd5757287168e54b817830adce9b0158d', time: '2016-06-30 19:26:09'
System info: host: 'testing-gce-221b369a-a72a-4586-b314-3521d80c3cb3', ip: '127.0.1.1', os.name: 'Linux', os.arch: 'amd64', os.version: '3.13.0-103-generic', java.version: '1.8.0_111'
Driver info: driver.version: unknown
2) You may only interact with visible elements
Build info: version: '2.53.1', revision: 'a36b8b1cd5757287168e54b817830adce9b0158d', time: '2016-06-30 19:26:09'
System info: host: 'testing-gce-221b369a-a72a-4586-b314-3521d80c3cb3', ip: '127.0.1.1', os.name: 'Linux', os.arch: 'amd64', os.version: '3.13.0-103-generic', java.version: '1.8.0_111'
Driver info: driver.version: unknown

As you can see, there is not so much useful information because I don't see which exactly element is invisible.

If it's possible, could you include also element's location in the error message?

[aaltat]

That error message comes directly from selenium and Selenium2Library cannot control the error message. You could run the test with --loglevel trace set from command line and you should see more details in the log.html

[php-coder]

In Java it isElementNotVisibleException that could be caught and additional message printed. Does Python library has such exception?

Or if it doesn't have type or it's not an exception, we could test the error message for a specific pattern and print more information. WDYT?

[php-coder]

You could run the test with --loglevel trace set from command line and you should see more details in the log.html

I don't have access to log.html because build happens on CI system. That's why I'd like to have a more detailed error message.

[aaltat]

Then you should get better access to the CI system. Without the log.html it's really hard to know which keyword did fail and without of the --loglevel trace set, it's impossible to know where in the source code error did happen. If you don't have access to those details, debugging the reason of the failure is really difficult.

[php-coder]

In this particular case, element locator would be enough to me for debugging.

[aaltat]

What you see in the error message is what you get in Python. When exception is raised, it's up to the raiser decide what information is included in the error message. There might be way to configure the error message from the selenium side, when the driver instance is created, but I don't know does that actually exist. Please read the selenium documentation for more details: https://seleniumhq.github.io/selenium/docs/api/py/api.html

[aaltat]

Element locator is visible in the log.html file when --loglevel trace set.

[aaltat]

Do you still think that this is a problem in the Selenium2Library or can we close the issue?

[php-coder]

Yes, I still think that UX for the such cases could be improved.

[aaltat]

In which way you would like to improve the what we log in the console?

[php-coder]

Element locator could be injected into the message itelf

1) You may only interact with visible elements (Keyword: Get Text Arguments: id=my-element)

or showed later:

1) You may only interact with visible elements
Keyword: Get Text
Arguments: id=my-element
Build info: version: '2.53.1', revision: 'a36b8b1cd5757287168e54b817830adce9b0158d', time: '2016-06-30 19:26:09'
System info: host: 'testing-gce-221b369a-a72a-4586-b314-3521d80c3cb3', ip: '127.0.1.1', os.name: 'Linux', os.arch: 'amd64', os.version: '3.13.0-103-generic', java.version: '1.8.0_111'
Driver info: driver.version: unknown

[aaltat]

Because the error message comes directly from selenium side, it would be better to request the change from the selenium side: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium

I know that it would be possible also the make the change in our code base, but that would require putting lot of try/expect and overwriting error message from the selenium side. And that is not a good idea. Also the information is already in the log.html message. Therefore decided to not to fix this issue.

[php-coder]

Could you look at this once again? We had a conversation in the upstream and it turned out that it's mostly impossible to put data about element to an error message on so deep level because they have only an element and don't have information about which locator was used to find it.