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When using Selenium/C# there are times where one cannot be sure if elements will be returned on not. This can be due to no records found, random date selection, type of records returned etc.

So in such cases waiting for an element to exist/visible/clickable is not the best method. Also I do not like using Thread.Sleep and at times waiting for a page to complete loading while Angular is still doing its stuff does not always work.

So in such circumstances is there a safe wait to employ a wait method for say 2 seconds without Thread.Sleep?

Any thoughts please?

Kev
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  • I can't think of any safer way than thread.sleep - sounds like that is what you want (not clear why you don't like using it). – topsail Jun 05 '22 at 20:23
  • You should re-thinking your application to **not** force a sleep. You can to have a "loading" or similar. I imagine you're not using async call in the proper way. Rmemeber that, when you use Observables (a httpClient call is an example) you need put your code inside your subscribe function – Eliseo Jun 06 '22 at 06:18
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    Is this topic can help you? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6992993/selenium-c-sharp-webdriver-wait-until-element-is-present – mikenlanggio Jun 06 '22 at 07:32
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    WebDriverWaits are polling loops... (there's a little 1/2 second sleep in there...) So there's no getting around using sleeps. However, you do not need to wait after a page load. Selenium already waits (again using polling with sleeps). So just use findElements() after a page load. It'll return immediately with a zero size array if the element was not found. So after a .get() (or "navigate") is used no wait is necessary. (Unless the site does lazy loading, which is pretty rare...) Otherwise you need a wait (sleeps in a polling loop). – pcalkins Jun 06 '22 at 23:14

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It's worth exploring the WebDriverWait approach. The boolean expression you provide can include multiple conditions so if you want to be checking UI elements that may or may not exist, you can cover these scenarios.

Here's just a little example.

new WebDriverWait(driver, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10))
    .Until(driver => driver.FindElementById("your-id").Displayed ||
                     driver.FindElementById("other-id").Displayed));

Though this may be an application user experience problem. There should be something in the UI to indicate the state of a page and you can accommodate for that in your wait condition with a variety of condition checks for the expected UI state.

James Croft
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