I’m trying to select “Option4-1” from a main menu using moveToElement() and click() in Selenium Java.
The test case shows as passed, but the expected slide-in window doesn’t appear after clicking “Option4-1”.
I’m using Actions with moveToElement for navigation, but it seems the interaction isn’t reflected visually, even though no errors are thrown.
Has anyone faced a similar issue where moveToElement Selenium Java works logically (no exceptions), but doesn’t replicate the real hover/click behavior on the UI?
@MattD_Burch I’ve hit this exact issue before, tests passing, but nothing actually happening visually. What worked for me was explicitly performing the hover and waiting for the submenu to appear before clicking.
Sometimes the UI needs just a bit of time for the animation or rendering.
Here’s what I did:
act.moveToElement(AddMenu).perform();
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOf(subMenu));
act.moveToElement(subMenu).perform();
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOf(subsubMenu));
subsubMenu.click();
Using perform() separately instead of chaining clicks helped a lot. It gives the UI enough time to trigger the slide-in animation.
Give that a shot if you haven’t already; it fixed the invisible hover issue for me.
I had a similar problem a few months ago, and it turned out to be related to implicit waits conflicting with Actions.
The issue was, moveToElement would technically run without error, but the DOM hadn’t actually updated visually yet.
What helped me was disabling implicit waits and using only explicit waits for the hover targets:
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(0, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
new WebDriverWait(driver, Duration.ofSeconds(10)).until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(AddMenu));
Then I used .moveToElement().build().perform() as usual. This made the interaction more predictable. Worth trying if you’re mixing waits like I was.
Just chiming in with what worked for me, it’s a bit unconventional. I was facing the same flaky UI behavior and realized that scrolling the element into view manually before hovering made a difference:
((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript("arguments[0].scrollIntoView(true);", subMenu);
act.moveToElement(subMenu).click().perform();
Turns out, if the element is even slightly outside the viewport, moveToElement doesn’t behave reliably, even if Selenium “thinks” it’s clickable. Scrolling it into view first completely solved it for me.
Might help in your case too, especially if you’re running tests in different resolutions or CI environments.