selenium: Exception in thread "main" org.openqa.selenium.StaleElementReferenceException: - selenium

Question

I am working on clicking on the navigation links(marked as 1,2,...Next) for a particular search in the site dice.com
When I run the below mentioned code, it is executed once and then displays StaleElementReferenceException
Request you to help in resolving this issue
import java.util.List;
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
public class Ex2 {
public static void main(String[] args) {
WebDriver driver=new FirefoxDriver();
driver.get("http://dice.com");
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[#id='FREE_TEXT']")).sendKeys("Selenium");
driver. findElement(By.xpath("//*[#id='searchSubmit']")).click();
//block that has navigation links
WebElement b=driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[#id='yui-main']/div/div[1]/div[1]/div[1][#class='pageProg']"));
//navigation links
List<WebElement> allLinks=b.findElements(By.tagName("a"));
System.out.println("Total links -->" + allLinks.size());
for(int i=0;i<allLinks.size();i++){
allLinks.get(i).click();
Thread.sleep(5000);
}
}
}
The error displayed is
Exception in thread "main" org.openqa.selenium.StaleElementReferenceException: Element not found in the cache - perhaps the page has changed since it was looked up
Command duration or timeout: 59 milliseconds
For documentation on this error, please visit: http://seleniumhq.org/exceptions/stale_element_reference.html
Build info: version: '2.35.0', revision: '8df0c6b', time: '2013-08-12 15:43:19'
System info: os.name: 'Windows 8', os.arch: 'amd64', os.version: '6.2', java.version: '1.7.0_11'
Session ID: 0410f597-c149-46b5-a2b7-e84c61cc73f1

Answer 1

The issue is when you click the first link, the page is reloaded, and the reference Selenium has to the page becomes stale. I think this approach will work for you instead:
List<WebElement> allLinks=b.findElements(By.tagName("a"));
System.out.println("Total links -->" + allLinks.size());
String[] linkText = new String[allLinks.size()];
for(int i=0;i<allLinks.size();i++)
{
linkText[i] = allLinks.get(i).text;
}
for(int i=0;i<linkText.length;i++)
{
findElements(By.linktext(linkText).click();
Thread.sleep(5000);
}

Answer 2

use this as a work around
try{
//Your code which causes exception
}
catch(org.openqa.selenium.StaleElementReferenceException e){
//Repeat the code in try
}
Reason for exception is because javascript has loaded the element one more time with same name or id or whatever and you are still referring to element which is not present now.