Alert handling in Selenium WebDriver (selenium 2) with Java

Question

I want to detect whether an alert is popped up or not. Currently I am using the following code:

    try {
        Alert alert = webDriver.switchTo().alert();

        // check if alert exists
        // TODO find better way
        alert.getText();

        // alert handling
        log().info("Alert detected: {}" + alert.getText());
        alert.accept();
    } catch (Exception e) {
    }

The problem is that if there is no alert on the current state of the web page, it waits for a specific amount of time until the timeout is reached, then throws an exception and therefore the performance is really bad.

Is there a better way, maybe an alert event handler which I can use for dynamically occurring alerts?

Answer 1

This is what worked for me using Explicit Wait from here WebDriver: Advanced Usage

public void checkAlert() {
    try {
        WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 2);
        wait.until(ExpectedConditions.alertIsPresent());
        Alert alert = driver.switchTo().alert();
        alert.accept();
    } catch (Exception e) {
        //exception handling
    }
}