Waiting for same XPATH used on different pages with Selenium - selenium

Question

I'm using Selenium Webdriver and have run into the following issue with my app under test.
The app has multiple pages each with an appropriate ".page-title" element which contains the name of the page (e.g. "Other Documents"). As the tests navigate around the app they assert that the browser is on the expected page using these elements before doing other stuff.
The issue is that if you click a button in the app which performs an action, then check that you're on the right page (e.g. check page-title element displays correct text), Webdriver doesn't wait for the action to be performed (e.g. new page load), it returns straight away and the test fails.
If you add a short thread sleep (500ms) between performing the action and checking you're on the right page, then you get StaleElementReferenceException (some of the time) and if you add a large thread sleep the test passes (but not quite all the time).
My aim is to reduce the flakiness of the tests, does anyone have a suggestion as to how I can do this without Thread.sleep?

Answer 1

instead of inserting thread.sleep method explicity
do try the WebDriver in built Implicitwait method..(C# code snippet)
Driver.Manage().Timeouts().ImplicitlyWait(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(Max_Time_Limit));
This makes WebDriver to wait till the element is visible/available. In case if it finds elements before the Max_Time_Limit, it snaps out of sleep mode and resumes the execution.
So no hassle of waiting till the Hard bound Max_Time_Limit.This way it helps speeding up your execution Time as well.
I hope this helps...All the best :-)

Answer 2

Try using this wait: using this you can wait for max time 15 secs/wait for the expected condition to be true i.e. wait for some element to be present.
You can give the xpath of some element on the next page, when that element is visible then the next step will be executed.
WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 15);
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By.xpath("\xpath of some element on the next page")));
//Assert page title
driver.getTitle();

Answer 3

use fluentWait mechanism . Considered to be a robust approach. As documentation on fluent wait gives:
An implementation of the Wait interface that may have its timeout and polling interval configured on the fly.
Each FluentWait instance defines the maximum amount of time to wait for a condition, as well as the frequency with which to check the condition. Furthermore, the user may configure the wait to ignore specific types of exceptions whilst waiting, such as NoSuchElementExceptions when searching for an element on the page.
details you can get here
here is the code of method I use:
public WebElement fluentWait(final By locator){
Wait<WebDriver> wait = new FluentWait<WebDriver>(driver)
.withTimeout(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
.pollingEvery(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
.ignoring(NoSuchElementException.class);
WebElement foo = wait.until(
new Function<WebDriver, WebElement>() {
public WebElement apply(WebDriver driver) {
return driver.findElement(locator);
}
}
);
return foo; } ;
String xPathElement="...blablabla...";
fluentWait(By.xpath(xPathElement)).click();
//fluentWait(By.xpath(xPathElement)).getText();
Hope it works for you.

Answer 4

You can use Selenium's ExpectedCondition.
The code below (written in JAVA) waits for a maximum of inTimeout seconds for the element you want to appear. If the element appears sooner, it ends the wait.
public static void wait(WebDriver b,long inTimeout) {
final SlnDriver browser=b;
final long NO_LOADING_TIMEOUT = inTimeout;
class HasCondition implements ExpectedCondition<Boolean> {
#Override
public Boolean apply(WebDriver d) {
Boolean expected=false;
WebElement e = browser.findElement(By.xpath("blabla"));
if (e.getText().contains("TextYouWant")) {
expected= true;
break;
}
}
return expected;
}
}
}
for (;;) {
try {
new WebDriverWait(browser, NO_LOADING_TIMEOUT).until(new HasCondition());
} catch (TimeoutException e) {
return;
}
}
}