WebDriver: The way to obtain element hidden under another (but static) one. Or how to fight with elements covering targets of your interaction

UPD: If you'd just like to scroll to the element that's somewhere at the bottom of the page see the solution here.

Assume you have the page with static bar (as in my case). This bar resides at the very bottom ov the page and is actualy stuck there whatever scroll you perform, so the user has the access to some feature permanently. Since such the UX has been introduced in the site I'm currently testing, some of my tests started to fail with the exception like this:

Element is not clickable at point (316, 494). Other element would receive the click

This was caused by the fact that the element does actually exist and is found by corresponding methods of webdriver, however it resides under that bar (that is static and alway at the bottom of the visible screen) element which actually received the click.

That's why we have two ways to resolve here. One - to remove the element which receives the click by javascript. However that is quite non-representative approach so we're NOT going to review it here. Another way is to scroll the page unil our required element becomes visible.

First you need the facility to execute javascript in your browser. The common practice is to have the method like this:

 public void runJS(String jsToRun){
  logger.debug("Running custom java script: " + jsToRun);
  ((JavascriptExecutor)getDriver()).executeScript(jsToRun);
 }

where getDriver() just returns your current WebDriver instance.
So, how to scroll the page in the browser. Again it can be done with certain javascript function execution. Such the script is very simple:

window.scrollBy(0,50);

This script means that we're scrolling the page to 50 px down (vertically) and not scrolling any px horizontally. Obviousely if we scroll 50 px down that does not mean that's enough. Probably we still have to proceed. So, how to design the iterative procedure meeting our expectation and going to be working fine. My suggestion is to introduce additional method. Let it be named scrollUntilVisibleAndClick. Check the source of the method first and then I'll explain how it works.

 public void scrollUntilVisibleAndClick(WebElement element, int maxScrollCout) throws YourOwnAutomationException{
  try{
   element.click();
   logger.debug("Element [" + element + "] is visble and successfully clicked.");
  }catch(WebDriverException e){
   logger.debug("Looks like the element is not clickable. Attempt to scroll down. MaxScrollCount = " + maxScrollCout);
   logger.debug(e.getMessage());
   if(maxScrollCout > 0){
    runJS("window.scrollBy(0,50);");
    scrollUntilVisibleAndClick(element, --maxScrollCout);
   }else{
    throw new YourOwnAutomationException("Couldn't scroll to the requested element");
   }
  }
 }

Let's now see how it works. To make this approach work you have to locate the element first. Once it is done you passes the element to the described method along with the parameter maxScrollcount which restricts the number of tries. The method attepts to click the element (doesn't matter if it is problematic from our standpoint). If it does, WebDriverException exception gets thrown. However we do not pass it on, but catch it and try to scroll down the page. Then we recursively call the same method with decreased "time-to-leave" parameter.
As the result of the method execution we can get the two finals. Either the maxScrollCount will reach zero and script will fail, or some new attempt after certain scroll will be successfull and the element will receive the click.