Switch Frames in Selenium

I’ve noticed that I was getting inexplicable “ElementNotFound” errors in Selenium when trying to swith frames after having previously switched a frame else where. It turns out that you need to switch back to the “defaultContent” frame.

For example, this will not sucessfully switch to “main_frame_2”

driver.switchTo().frame("main_frame_1");
driver.switchTo().frame("sub_frame_of_frame_1");
driver.switchTo().frame("main_frame_2");

However, by using “defaultContent”, this does work

driver.switchTo().frame("main_frame_1");
driver.switchTo().frame("sub_frame_of_frame_1");
driver.switchTo().defaultContent();
driver.switchTo().frame("main_frame_2");