The UiElement is no longer valid

Description

A UI Automation activity (for example, Click, Type Into, etc.) fails with the following error message: The UiElement is no longer valid.

Origine

The possible causes of the issue are the following:

• The issue could occur in web automation processes when the web page is reloaded after the selector search found the UI element, but the action on that element is yet to be executed.

  This may happen when looking for a web element that is no longer in the tab or in the frame, either because it was refreshed and invalidated, or because something on the page changed, and the selector no longer matches.

  The page might refresh automatically, even without any explicit instruction to refresh the screen.

• The issue could occur when the UI element is stored in a variable using the Check App State activity, for example, and the element is later used in another activity, following a refresh.
• The issue could occur if a located element is stored in the cache, but if the page changes in the meantime, this could make the reference invalid.

Solution

To avoid this issue, you can do the following:

• Include the specific UI Automation activity in a Retry Scope activity.
• Check the readiness of the UI Element prior to the action, using the Check App State activity (or classic activities Find Element or Element Exists).
• Indicate the UI element again after the refresh, if an automatic page refresh occurs.
• Increase the Delay after/Delay before properties values or set the Timeout seconds value.