Selenium Explicit Wait

Explicit wait is a programmatic approach to problem of waiting for elements. Contrary to Implicit Wait that I have described in previous article Explicit Wait requires more coding but also gives much more flexibility. Any action that can be performed using WebDriver can be wrapped using explicit wait and performed over defined period of time checking custom condition. As fast as the condition is satisfied test will continue and if condition was not satisfied for period longer then defined threshold then TimeoutException or any of the not ignored exceptions will be thrown. I will try to address problems that I have described in article about Implicit Wait and show how they can be solved using explicit approach.

Selenium Implicit Wait

Implicit wait is a way of telling selenium driver that it should poll DOM for certain amount of time when performing findElement or findElements. Tests will continue immediately if the element is available earlier and if not then after timeout period NoSouchElementException will be thrown. Using it requires only one time initialization and after that all findElement and findElements invocations will be aware of additional time they should wait. Although it sounds like a convenient and reliable solution it is very limiting and you may sooner or later run into one of the problems mentioned below.