Webdriver failure not catched by java with Appium 1.4.16 on windows

Issues/Bugs
1

Hello,

First of all this happens for the moment only on Android tablets for some reason.
I tried it on phones with Android 6.0 to 4.4 and it’s working.

But for some reason on tablets it doesn’t.

I’m trying to find an advertisement on the screen for this I’m searching it with either this :

private boolean findAdContainerDefault (){
    boolean found = false;
    try {
        WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 10);
        wait.until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.xpath("//android.widget.ViewSwitcher/android.widget.FrameLayout/android.webkit.WebView")));
        found = true;
    } catch (Exception e) {}
    return found;
}

or this :

private boolean findAdContainerFor44 (){
    boolean found = false;
    try {
        WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 10);
        wait.until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.xpath("//android.widget.ViewSwitcher/android.widget.FrameLayout/android.view.View")));
        found = true;
    } catch (Exception e) {}
    return found;
}

since sometimes webview doesn’t show in the inspector for some devices.

This work like a charm on phones but for some reason on tablets it’s sometimes working sometimes not and if i’m using this methods 8 times in my test it might work 6 times & on the 7th crash everything even if I have a try catch over it.

And apparently it’s a server side error :
this is the error i get :

org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.ExpectedConditions findElement
WARNING: WebDriverException thrown by findElement(By.xpath: //android.widget.ViewSwitcher/android.widget.FrameLayout/android.webkit.WebView)
org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException: An unknown server-side error occurred while processing the command. (WARNING: The server did not provide any stacktrace information)
Command duration or timeout: 101 milliseconds

and this is what i get in the server side :

> info: [debug] Pushing command to appium work queue: ["find",{"strategy":"xpath","selector":"//android.widget.ViewSwitcher/android.widget.FrameLayout/android.webkit.WebView","context":"","multiple":false}]
> info: [debug] [BOOTSTRAP] [debug] Got data from client: {"cmd":"action","action":"find","params":{"strategy":"xpath","selector":"//android.widget.ViewSwitcher/android.widget.FrameLayout/android.webkit.WebView","context":"","multiple":false}}
> info: [debug] [BOOTSTRAP] [debug] Got command of type ACTION
> info: [debug] [BOOTSTRAP] [debug] Got command action: find
> info: [debug] [BOOTSTRAP] [debug] Finding //android.widget.ViewSwitcher/android.widget.FrameLayout/android.webkit.WebView using XPATH with the contextId:  multiple: false
> info: [debug] [BOOTSTRAP] [debug] Command returned error:java.lang.RuntimeException: Failed to Dump Window Hierarchy
> info: [debug] Condition unmet after 64ms. Timing out.
> info: [debug] Responding to client with error: {"status":13,"value":{"message":"An unknown server-side error occurred while processing the command.","origValue":"Failed to Dump Window Hierarchy"},"sessionId":"0552388e-e8d3-4be6-ba40-1e8225064654"}
> info: <-- POST /wd/hub/session/0552388e-e8d3-4be6-ba40-1e8225064654/element 500 66.384 ms - 200 
> info: [debug] [BOOTSTRAP] [debug] Returning result: {"status":13,"value":"Failed to Dump Window Hierarchy"}

Is it known bug or something ?
Is there a work around ?

2

I found a way to work around this apparently this issue is comming from the visibilityOfElementLocated
I’m now using the presenceOfElementLocated instead and it doesn’t looks like it’s crashing anymore

3

Did you find this solution helpful at stackoverflow?

4

Yes & no.

I already had my framework doing all the job to you proposed on stackoverflow but the presenceOfElementLocated seems to not trigger the same issue but I still had the unknown server-side error occurred while processing the command. on some runs but i did add so sleep here and there and now it seems more stable …

But what I still don’t get is why does the error trigger even with a try catch around it.

1 Like