An
Alert
is a small box that appears on the UI to provide some information to the user or to seek the user’s response in the form of Yes/No/Cancel/OK/Text, etc. They are also known as ‘Dialog-Box’. They appear as a pop-up on the screen and wait for the user to respond before proceeding with the rest of the operations on the UI. They can appear as:
Alert Box:
This simple dialog box has only one button, “OK”, and provides some information to the user. The user clicks “OK” as a response.
Confirmation Box:
This dialog box asks for confirmation or cancellation of an action. It may have two buttons, “OK” and “Cancel”.
Prompt Box:
Asks for some text input from the user, and then the user clicks some button to confirm or cancel the information.
NoAlertPresentException
extends
NotFoundException
, indicating that a WebDriver has tried to interact with an alert/ warning/ prompt/confirmation box that is not present on the screen. First, the Selenium script needs to switch the focus on the alert box and perform the action, such as clicking “OK”. Switching to the non-existent (may be delayed) alert pop-up will result in
NoAlertPresentException.
It is a pretty common scenario that can be avoided easily.
The common reasons for this exception are:
Timing Issues:
The Selenium script is trying to interact with the alert before it appears or after it has already appeared and vanished.
Incorrect Alert Handling:
The alert is triggered. However, the Selenium script is handling it incorrectly.
No Alert is Triggered:
The Selenium script expects the alert to appear after a user action. But actually, the user action has not triggered it.
Resolution to NoAlertPresentException in Selenium
Below are a few ways to handle
NoAlertPresentException
:
Wait for the Alert to be Present Before Interaction
If you try to interact with the alert too quickly before it appears, the exception will be thrown, as shown below:
# Example: Interacting with an alert without waiting for it to appear
driver.find_element_by_id("trigger_alert_button").click()
alert = driver.switch_to.alert
alert.accept()
Use explicit wait for the alert to be present on UI before the Selenium script interacts with it. In the example below, WebDriver will wait 10 seconds for the alert to be present on the screen before it interacts with it.
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
driver.find_element_by_id("trigger_alert_button").click()
WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.alert_is_present())
alert = driver.switch_to.alert
alert.accept()
Use try-except or try-catch Blocks
Use try-except (in Python) or try-catch (in Java) to handle the
NoAlertPresentException.
Check beforehand that the exception is present before interacting with it:
from selenium.common.exceptions import NoAlertPresentException
alert = driver.switch_to.alert
alert.accept() # or other interactions
except NoAlertPresentException:
print("No alert present at this moment.")
Manage Alert Trigger Event Correctly
You need to make sure that the event (user action) triggering the alert is correctly implemented in the code. For example, a UI prompt alert is present, requiring some text to be sent as a response. Then, the user clicks the “OK” button to accept the alert. If the script directly accepts the alert without providing any text as input, such handling is incorrect and may trigger the exception as shown below:
# Example: Incorrectly handling a prompt
driver.find_element_by_id("trigger_prompt").click()
alert = driver.switch_to.alert
alert.accept() # Prompt requires input before accepting
The fix for this issue is to provide the text input and then accept the alert for a smooth alert event trigger and further processing. The correct code is as follows:
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.
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