How to Inspect Dynamic HTML Elements (that keep disappearing!) in Chrome

I still find styling HTML elements difficult at times, trying to figure out where the styling is being inherited from and exactly which elements I need to apply styles to. The Developer Tools in Chrome go a long way to assisting with this. For this tip I’ll assume you are familiar with Chrome Developer Tools for inspecting HTML elements and CSS styles.

What I wanted to focus on was those frustrating elements that only exist on the page (in the Document Object Model) while a certain element has the “focus”. This often happens with navigation menu options or dropdown controls, where you have the menu options or dropdown options visible on the screen but as soon as you click something in Developer Tools (to go exploring), the menu options or dropdown options disappear and don’t exist on the page anymore! This is usually because an event such as the blur event is fired when you click outside the element and this removes the elements from the page that you are trying to inspect.

This tip might not work in all scenarios but it has gotten me out of trouble on a few occasions.

Here’s an example scenario. On the left side of the screenshots you can see the OnePlaceMail (Outlook Add-in) displayed in Chrome, on the right hand side is Developer Tools inspector window. I’m using a 3rd party control for my “Content Type” dropdown (it’s the Kendo UI for Angular library)

When collapsed it’s easy to inspect the kendo-dropdownlist element (that holds the selected value of ‘Document’. At this stage the menu options that will appear when I click on the dropdown don’t even exist in the DOM.

When I do click to expand the dropdown, the image below shows that a new kendo-popup element appears in the DOM (and it contains sub-elements to represent each of the options). But the problem is if we now try to use the Developer Tools and expand that kendo-popup element to see those sub-elements then the dropdown collapses (because I’ve click off it) and the kendo-popup element is removed from the DOM and we’re left with nothing to inspect!

So to work around this in the Developer Tools inspector, right click on the element that is driving the elements to appear/disappear (kendo-dropdownlist) and select Break on | subtree modifications.

Now go to the web page and click on the dropdown to show the dropdown options. They are shown (elements added to the DOM) but the Developer Tools inspector now goes into a paused state. The web page is effectively frozen.

While in this paused state, you can now return to the elements tab and we can expand and explore that pesky kendo-popup element that was dynamically created. This time however the dropdown won’t collapse itself as we click around in the inspector.

I hope you find this tip useful