Selenium Explicit and Implicit Waits

Waiting is having the automated task execution elapse a certain amount of time before continuing with the next step. You should choose to use Explicit Waits or Implicit Waits.

WARNING: Do not mix implicit and explicit waits. Doing so can cause unpredictable wait times. For example setting an implicit wait of 10 seconds and an explicit wait of 15 seconds, could cause a timeout to occur after 20 seconds.

Explicit Waits

An explicit wait 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.

  

from selenium import webdriver

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait # available since 2.4.0

from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC # available since 2.26.0

ff = webdriver.Firefox()

ff.get("")

try:

    element = WebDriverWait(ff, 10).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, "myDynamicElement")))

finally:

    ff.quit()

This waits up to 10 seconds before throwing a TimeoutException or if it finds the element will return it in 0 - 10 seconds. WebDriverWait by default calls the ExpectedCondition every 500 milliseconds until it returns successfully. A successful return value for the ExpectedCondition function type is a Boolean value of true, or a non-null object.

This example is also functionally equivalent to the first example.

Expected Conditions

There are some common conditions that are frequently encountered when automating web browsers. Listed below are a few examples for the usage of such conditions. The Java, C#, and Python bindings include convienence methods so you don’t have to code an ExpectedCondition class yourself or create your own utility package for them.

• Element is Clickable - it is Displayed and Enabled.

  

from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10)

element = wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID,'someid')))

The ExpectedConditions package () () () contains a set of predefined conditions to use with WebDriverWait.

Implicit Waits

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.

  

from selenium import webdriver

ff = webdriver.Firefox()

ff.implicitly_wait(10) # seconds

ff.get("")

myDynamicElement = ff.find_element_by_id("myDynamicElement")

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