WebDriverException: Returned value cannot be converted to WebElement: {} while using WebDriver with Safari 11 on Mac OS X

Question

I have a selenium webdriver script which performs some regression tests on my application under test. The script works perfectly on Google Chrome, Firefox, IE, etc.

Answer 1

This error message...

org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException: Returned value cannot be converted to WebElement: {}

...implies that WebDriverException was raised while JVM tried to cast the returned value into a WebElement.

However your main issue is as follows:

java.lang.ClassCastException: com.google.common.collect.Maps$TransformedEntriesMap cannot be cast to org.openqa.selenium.WebElement

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ClassCastException

ClassCastException is thrown to indicate that the code has attempted to cast an object to a subclass of which it is not an instance. As an example, the following code generates a ClassCastException:

Object x = new Integer(0);
System.out.println((String)x);

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What went wrong

It is not clear about your usecase why you require to grab the tag. But as per the following discussions:

• java.lang.ClassCastException exception while clicking/inputing on any web object
• WebDriver and Firefox 4+: this.getWindow() is null

There can be three possibilities of this error as follows:

• Your script/program was trying to access the tag when the page was still loading perhaps when some JavaScript / Ajax was still active.

• Solution: Induce WebDriverWait for the WebElement to whom you desire to interact with as follows:

  WebElement element = new WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By.id("elementID")));
  

• If you want to get the Page Source use getPageSource() method as follows:

  System.out.println(driver.getPageSource());
  

• If the control of the program was within an