Wait for an element using Selenium webdriver

Question

What is the best way to wait for an element to appear on a web page? I have read that we can use implicit wait and functions like webdriverwait, fluentwait etc and last but not

Answer 1

Always start by using a implicit wait. I think Selenium defaults to 5 seconds and so if you do a driver.findElement(), the implication is that it will wait up to 5 seconds. That should do it. If you are experiencing a scenario where the time it takes is unpredictable, then use FluentWait (with the same 5 second timeout) but also using the .ignoring method and wrap that inside a while loop . Here is the basic idea:

int tries=0;
while ( tries < 3 ) {
  //fluent wait (with .ignoring) inside here
  tries ++1;
}

Answer 2

You could wait for the presence of the element to appear as follows:

new WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(ExpectedConditions.presenceOfElementLocated(By.id("someId")));

Answer 3

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 20);
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By.id("optionsBuilderSelect_input")));

I'm a professional scraper (http://nitinsurana.com) I've written 30+ softwares using selenium and I've never faced any such issue, anyways above is a sample code.

All I can think of is that what until condition has to be checked because many a times elements are already visible, but they are not clickable and things like that. I guess you should give different options a try and I hope you'll find the one required.

Answer 4

public boolean waitForElement(WebElement ele, String xpath, int seconds) throws InterruptedException{
    //returns true if the xpath appears in the webElement within the time
    //false when timed out
    int t=0;
    while(t<seconds*10){
        if(ele.findElements(By.xpath(xpath)).size()>0)
            return true;
        else{
            Thread.sleep(100);
            t++;
            continue;
        }
    }       
    System.out.println("waited for "+seconds+"seconds. But couldn't find "+xpath+ " in the element specified");
    return false;
}