java - How do you get selenium to recognize that a page loaded?

Question

In certain unknown situations selenium does not detect that a page has loaded when using the open method. I am using the Java API. For example (This code will not produce this error. I don't know of an externally visible page that will.):

Selenium browser = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, "*firefox", "http://www.google.com");
browser.start();
browser.open("http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en");
browser.type("q", "hello world");

When the error occurs, the call to 'open' times out, even though you can clearly see that the page has loaded successfully before the timeout occurs. Increasing the timeout does not help. The call to 'type' never occurs, no progress is made.

How do you get selenium to recognize that the page has loaded when this error occurs?

Answer 1

I faced this problem quite recently.

All JS-based solutions didn't quite fit ICEFaces 2.x + Selenium 2.x/Webdriver combination I have.

What I did and what worked for me is the following:

In the corner of the screen, there's connection activity indicator.

            <ice:outputConnectionStatus id="connectStat"
                                        showPopupOnDisconnect="true"/>

In my Java unit test, I wait until its 'idle' image comes back again:

private void waitForAjax() throws InterruptedException {
    for (int second = 0;; second++) {
        if (second >= 60) fail("timeout");
        try { 
            if ("visibility: visible;".equals(
                selenium.getAttribute("top_right_form:connectStat:connection-idle@style"))) { 
                break;
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {

        }
        Thread.sleep(1000);
    }
}

You can disable rendering of this indicator in production build, if showing it at the page is unnecessary, or use empty 1x1 gifs as its images.

Works 100% (with popups, pushed messages etc.) and relieves you from the hell of specifying waitForElement(...) for each element separately.

Hope this helps someone.