UiPath Element Exists Always Returns True

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I’m 1-year into developing bots with UiPath and I want to share a very annoying thing that was difficult for me to resolve. Element Exists Always Returns True.

There are several forum posts about the issue. Most of which are people going back and forth on describing what they implemented, how its not working, yada, yada, yada. There’s a video about using Get Attribute as an alternative that didn’t work for my flow; which is basic. Then after an hour of searching I came to one post that gave the solution that “finally” worked (Thanks to the one up high).

When adding the Element Exists activity to the bot you absolutely have to add a value in the Target >> Timeout property of the element. The bot needs the milliseconds to evaluate if the element exists to accurately set the boolean variable to either True or False. -This Target Milliseconds is presented as optional in the online documentation, it should have the word “required” next to it.

I’m almost positive experts know this OR maybe my flow is different…all I know is the variable that always returned true suddenly returned false when millisecond value was added; go figure.

Happy automating!

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@vgharris08
Welcome to the Forum
Thanks Valerie for sharing the feedback with forum.

For this purpose we have released a WorkFlowAnalyzer Rule:

The ST-PRR-REPLY001 - TimeOutNotSetRule can be used for checking if TimeOut is not set and we can post edit the properties

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Hi @vgharris08,

By any chance, Have you tried setting “wait for ready” property to interactive and see its behavior?

When its set to None, even if its not visible on the screen, this element returns true as it stil exists in there but not loaded on the screen yet.

But when ‘interactive’ is set, it waits for element to load properly and become interactive and then only return true else false.

Regards
Sonali