Equivalent of waitForVisible/waitForElementPresent in Selenium WebDriver tests using Java?

Question

With "HTML" Selenium tests (created with Selenium IDE or manually), you can use some very handy commands like WaitForElementPresent or WaitForVisible.

<tr>
    <td>waitForElementPresent</td>
    <td>id=saveButton</td>
    <td></td>
</tr>

When coding Selenium tests in Java (Webdriver / Selenium RC—I'm not sure of the terminology here), is there something similar built-in?

For example, for checking that a dialog (that takes a while to open) is visible...

WebElement dialog = driver.findElement(By.id("reportDialog"));
assertTrue(dialog.isDisplayed());  // often fails as it isn't visible *yet*

What's the cleanest robust way to code such check?

Adding Thread.sleep() calls all over the place would be ugly and fragile, and rolling your own while loops seems pretty clumsy too...

Answer 1

Implicit and Explicit Waits

Implicit Wait

An implicit wait is to tell WebDriver to poll the DOM for a certain amount of time when trying to find an element or elements if they are not immediately available. The default setting is 0. Once set, the implicit wait is set for the life of the WebDriver object instance.

driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS);

Explicit Wait + Expected Conditions

An explicit waits is code you define to wait for a certain condition to occur before proceeding further in the code. The worst case of this is Thread.sleep(), which sets the condition to an exact time period to wait. There are some convenience methods provided that help you write code that will wait only as long as required. WebDriverWait in combination with ExpectedCondition is one way this can be accomplished.

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 10);
WebElement element = wait.until(
        ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.id("someid")));