Hard and soft assertion for Webdriver - selenium

Question

I am a newbie in automation testing, and m really confused about assert and verify.Since, I am using TestNG, according to my research I came to know that in webdriver, we dont have verify, we have hard and soft assertion. But when I search for it, I get all mixed answers. and nowhere can I find a detailed example.
For soft assertion I saw someone using 'customverification' but when I try to write that in my program I get error, asking to create a class or interface.
Can someone please help me in this. I am studying through internet so its really hard to get correct answers.
Thanks
package revision;
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.testng.Assert;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;
public class Six {
WebDriver driver=new FirefoxDriver();
#Test
public void SandyOne() {
driver.get("file:///C:/Users/Sandeep%20S/Desktop/Test.html");
Assert.assertTrue(IsElementPresent(By.xpath("//input[#id='custom']")), "tab was missing");
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[#id='custom']")).sendKeys("abcd");
System.out.println("1st program");
System.out.println("blah 1");
System.out.println("blah 2");
}
public boolean IsElementPresent(By by) {
try {
driver.findElements(by);
return true;
} catch (org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchElementException e) {
return false;
}
}
}

Answer 1

If you have an assert that fails the test will be stopped, where for verify the test will be continued and the error will be logged.
Ideally you will have only one assert per test (e.g. the correct page has loaded) and verify will be used to check the information on that page in this case.
Therefore, if the correct page was not loaded, there is no point in checking the stuff on the page is correct.
You can get an idea and a visual example here.

Answer 2

Your test probably fails here:
Assert.assertTrue(IsElementPresent(By.xpath("//input[#id='custom']")), "tab was missing");
because IsElementPresent returns false. One way to avoid that would be:
try {
Assert.assertTrue(IsElementPresent(By.xpath("//input[#id='custom']")), "tab was missing");
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[#id='custom']")).sendKeys("abcd");
}
catch (AssertionError ae) {
//ignore
}
However, catching errors is quite ugly code. A better way would be to use WebDriver.findElements(By by) and check if the resulting list is empty or not.

Answer 3

Hard Assertions:Test execution stops as soon as assertion failure found.
Soft Assertions:Test execution continues even if assertion failure found.
e.g. You have 3 assert statements Assert1,Assert2,Assert3
Now if Assert2 fails in case of hard assertion the test will terminate.
In case of soft assertion it will move to next steps in test and then terminate.
You need to instantiate soft assertion as:
SoftAssertions softAssertion = new SoftAssertions();
softAssertion.assertTrue(condition,message)
In your given code snippet hard assertion makes sense since you cannot move to next step to send text until the input box is found.

Answer 4

In given example you don't need to assert element presence. If it's missing the findElement method will throw an error and you will know that it's not there.
If you have elements's Id, use it instead of xpath. This will make the code more readable and faster:
driver.findElement(By.Id("custom")).sendKeys("abcd");
Instead of directly calling the findElement method, it's recommended to use the PageObject pattern and pick elements with annotations, see PageFactory:
public class TestPage {
#FindBy(id = "custom")
WebElement custom;
private WebDriver driver;
public TestPage (WebDriver driver) {
this.driver = driver;
PageFactory.initElements(driver, this);
}
public TestPage inputCustom(String txt) {
custom.sendKeys(txt);
return this;
}
}
#Test
public void SandyOne() {
// ...
TestPage page = new TestPage(driver);
page.inputCustom("abcd");
// ...
}