How to Select Items in Dropdown in Selenium
Question: Firstly, I have been trying to get the dropdown from this web page:
<http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/Interconnect/Home/Products/ProductCatalog/Catalog/?PC_Z7_RJH9U5230O73D0ISNF9B3C3SI1000000_nid=RFCNF5FK7WitWK7G49LP38glNZJXPCDXLDbl>

This is the code I have:

    
    
        import urllib2
        from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
        import re
        from pprint import pprint
    
        from selenium import webdriver
    
        url = 'http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/Interconnect/Home/Products/ProductCatalog/Catalog/?PC_Z7_RJH9U5230O73D0ISNF9B3C3SI1000000_nid=RFCNF5FK7WitWK7G49LP38glNZJXPCDXLDbl'
    
        element_xpath = '//*[@id="Component1"]'
        driver = webdriver.PhantomJS()
        driver.get(url)
        element = driver.find_element_by_xpath(element_xpath)
        element_xpath = '/option[@value="02"]'
        all_options = element.find_elements_by_tag_name("option")
        for option in all_options:
            print("Value is: %s" % option.get_attribute("value"))
            option.click()
        source = driver.page_source.encode('utf-8', 'ignore')
        driver.quit()
    
        source = str(source)
    
        soup = BeautifulSoup(source, 'html.parser')
    
        print soup
    

What prints out is this:

    
    
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "../../../../test.py", line 58, in <module>
    Value is: XX
        main()
      File "../../../../test.py", line 46, in main
        option.click()
      File "/home/eric/dev/octocrawler-env/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium-2.33.0-py2.7.egg/selenium/webdriver/remote/webelement.py", line 54, in click
        self._execute(Command.CLICK_ELEMENT)
      File "/home/eric/dev/octocrawler-env/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium-2.33.0-py2.7.egg/selenium/webdriver/remote/webelement.py", line 228, in _execute
        return self._parent.execute(command, params)
      File "/home/eric/dev/octocrawler-env/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium-2.33.0-py2.7.egg/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 165, in execute
        self.error_handler.check_response(response)
      File "/home/eric/dev/octocrawler-env/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium-2.33.0-py2.7.egg/selenium/webdriver/remote/errorhandler.py", line 158, in check_response
        raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)
    selenium.common.exceptions.ElementNotVisibleException: Message: u'{"errorMessage":"Element is not currently visible and may not be manipulated","request":{"headers":{"Accept":"application/json","Accept-Encoding":"identity","Connection":"close","Content-Length":"81","Content-Type":"application/json;charset=UTF-8","Host":"127.0.0.1:51413","User-Agent":"Python-urllib/2.7"},"httpVersion":"1.1","method":"POST","post":"{\\"sessionId\\": \\"30e4fd50-f0e4-11e3-8685-6983e831d856\\", \\"id\\": \\":wdc:1402434863875\\"}","url":"/click","urlParsed":{"anchor":"","query":"","file":"click","directory":"/","path":"/click","relative":"/click","port":"","host":"","password":"","user":"","userInfo":"","authority":"","protocol":"","source":"/click","queryKey":{},"chunks":["click"]},"urlOriginal":"/session/30e4fd50-f0e4-11e3-8685-6983e831d856/element/%3Awdc%3A1402434863875/click"}}' ; Screenshot: available via screen
    

And the weirdest most infuriating bit of it all is that sometimes it actually
all works out. I have no clue what's going on here.

* * *

**UPDATE**

It seems I have no issues with visibility of dropdown forms on other sites,
just this one. Is there something that might make the form invisible (and if
so, why only 95% of the time)? Could there be an issue loading the page that
might cause things not to be visible?


Answer: Using Selenium Webdriver with Python3 here's how I did it:

    
    
        all_options = self.driver.find_element_by_id("Component1")
        options = all_options.find_elements_by_tag_name("option")
        for each_option in all_options:
            print(each_option.get_attribute("value"))
    

If you're trying to select something from the textbox here's how to do it:

    
    
        select = Select(self.driver.find_element_by_id("Component1"))
        select.select_by_visible_text("02")
    

references: <http://selenium-python.readthedocs.org/api.html>

