In the Navigator.click() method where exactly in the stack does the scrollIntoView() occur? - geb

Question

With Geb and WebElement, before a click is performed the webelement is first scrolled into view. I run into a problem here because there is a 'menu' bar at the top of screen that the webdriver doesn't see. this cause chrome to throw a webdriver exception stating that the element is not clickable at point x,y since the webDriver scrolls the element under the menu banner.
If I look at the implementation of the NonEmptyNavigator and subsequently remote webElement, I can't find where the scrollIntoView() occurs in the code. I want to put some code in between the scrollIntoView() and the actual click action so that I can offset the ScrollIntoView() slightly so the click can be performed. where exactly in stack for Navigator.click() does the scrolling into view happen?

Answer 1

Scrolling elements into view before clicking when calling WebElement.click() happens inside of the implementation of the method on the browser side so you won't find any reference to scrolling anything into view in Geb or RemoteWebElement. Here's a link to an example of the scrolling happening on the browser side from Marionette's (Firefox WebDriver implementation) code base: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/testing/marionette/interaction.js#148.
If you wish to manually scroll the element into view before clicking on it you might want to write a Geb module and overwrite click() in it:
class ViewPortOffsetModule extends Module {
Navigator click() {
//put your implementation of scrolling the element to view here, most probably using the js executor
super.click()
}
}
and then in your content definition:
static content = {
elementNeedingOffsetWhenScrollingIntoView { $("#my-element").module(ViewPortOffsetModule) }
}
Now, if you correctly implemented scrolling into view in ViewPortOffsetModule, calling elementNeedingOffsetWhenScrollingIntoView.click() will scroll the element into view with offset before clicking it.