What is Explicit Waits?
An explicit wait is a code you define to wait for a certain condition to occur before proceeding further in the code. The extreme case is time.sleep(), which sets the condition to an exact waiting period. There are some convenience methods provided that help you write code that will wait only as long as required. Explicit waits are achieved by using the webdriverWait class in combination with expected_conditions.
Let’s consider an example
# import necessary classes
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
# create driver object
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
# A URL that delays loading
driver.get("http://somedomain / url_that_delays_loading")
try:
# wait 10 seconds before looking for element
element = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, "myDynamicElement"))
)
finally:
# else quit
driver.quit()
Explanation of Code
- This waits up to 10 seconds before throwing a TimeoutException unless it finds the element to return within 10 seconds.
- WebDriverWait by default calls the ExpectedCondition every 500 milliseconds until it returns successfully.
Expected Conditions
There are some common conditions that are frequently of use when automating web browsers. For example, presence_of_element_located, title_is, ad so on.
One can check entire methods from here – Convenience Methods and some of them are follows
- title_is
- title_contains
- presence_of_element_located
- visibility_of_element_located
- visibility_of
- presence_of_all_elements_located
- element_located_to_be_selected
- element_selection_state_to_be
- element_located_selection_state_to_be
- alert_is_present
Explicit waits in Selenium Python
Selenium Python is one of the great tools for testing automation. These days most web apps are using AJAX techniques. When the browser loads a page, the elements within that page may load at different time intervals.
Table of Content
- What is Explicit Waits?
- How to create an Explicit wait in Selenium Python?
- Conclusion
- Frequently Asked Questions in Explicit waits in Selenium Python
This makes locating elements difficult, if an element is not yet present in the DOM, a locate function will raise an ElementNotVisibleException exception. Using waits, we can solve this issue.
- Waiting provides some slack between actions performed – mostly locating an element or any other operation with the element.
- Selenium Webdriver provides two types of waits – implicit & explicit. This article revolves around Explicit wait in Selenium Python.
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