Selenium Wait

Why do users need Selenium Wait?

Most web applications are developed with Ajax and Javascript. When a page loads on a browser, the various web elements that someone wants to interact with may load at various time intervals.

This obviously creates difficulty in identifying any element. On top of that, if an element is not located then the “ElementNotVisibleException” appears. Selenium Wait commands help resolve this issue.

Selenium WebDriver provides three commands to implement wait in tests.

Implicit Wait

Explicit Wait

Fluent Wait



1.Implicit Wait in Selenium

Implicit wait is applied globally on all web elements .

Implicit Wait directs the Selenium WebDriver to wait for a certain measure of time before throwing an exception. Once this time is set, WebDriver will wait for the element before the exception occurs.

Once the command is in place, Implicit Wait stays in place for the entire duration for which the browser is open. Its default setting is 0, and the specific wait time needs to be set by the following protocol.



Driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10,TimeUnit.SECONDS);



2.Explicit Wait in Selenium

By using Explicit Wait command, the WebDriver is directed to wait until a certain condition occurs before proceeding with executing the code.

Setting Explicit Wait is important in cases where there are certain elements that naturally take more time to load. If one sets an implicit wait command, then the browser will wait for the same time frame before loading every web element. This causes an unnecessary delay in executing the test script.

Explicit wait is more intelligent, but can only be applied for specified elements


WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver,20);

Element = wait.until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.xpath());


In order to declare explicit wait, one has to use “ExpectedConditions”. The following Expected Conditions can be used in Explicit Wait.

alertIsPresent()

elementSelectionStateToBe()

elementToBeClickable()

elementToBeSelected()

frameToBeAvaliableAndSwitchToIt()

invisibilityOfTheElementLocated()

invisibilityOfElementWithText()

presenceOfAllElementsLocatedBy()

presenceOfElementLocated()

textToBePresentInElement()

textToBePresentInElementLocated()

textToBePresentInElementValue()

titleIs()

titleContains()

visibilityOf()

visibilityOfAllElements()

visibilityOfAllElementsLocatedBy()

visibilityOfElementLocated()

3.Fluent Wait in Selenium


The Fluent Wait command defines the maximum amount of time for Selenium WebDriver to wait for a certain condition to appear. It also defines the frequency with which WebDriver will check if the condition appears before throwing the “ElementNotVisibleException”.

To put it simply, Fluent Wait looks for a web element repeatedly at regular intervals until timeout happens or until the object is found.

Fluent Wait commands are most useful when interacting with web elements that can sometimes take more time than usual to load. This is largely something that occurs in Ajax applications.

While using Fluent Wait, it is possible to set a default polling period as needed. The user can configure the wait to ignore any exceptions during the polling period.

Wait wait = new FluentWait(WebDriver reference)

.withTimeout(timeout, SECONDS)

.pollingEvery(timeout, SECONDS)

.ignoring(Exception.class);