Question

How would you go about checking to see if a particular WebElement has been updated?

I have a test that performs a form save and then the UI returns a success/error message.

I am doing a series of saves and I need to test and see if the message is what is expected.

Selenium goes so fast that the browser does not have a chance to catch up.

This is the code that I have for testing for an error message (There is an equivalent success message function as well)

    public void assertErrorMessage(String errorMsg) {

    // set the wait time a bit so the page can load.
    driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
    List<WebElement> results = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//div[@id='lift__noticesContainer__']/descendant::*"));
    boolean success = false;
    String message = "";
    for (WebElement result : results) {

        String id = result.getAttribute("id");
        if (id.contains("___error")) {
            success = true;
        }
        if (result.getTagName().equals("li")) {
            message += result.getText().trim();
        }
    }
    Assert.assertTrue(success, "No error message generated");
    Assert.assertTrue(message.equals(errorMsg), "Expecting message: \"" + errorMsg + "\" but got \"" + message + "\"");

}

As this is written, this looks for the presence of a particular <div> and checks to see if contains certain attributes. If it does, get the message.

The thing is, this will always be true and hence my tests are failing since the message is different than the previous one, but the UI hasn’t caught up to where selenium is.

My solution so far to force a Thread.sleep(2000) to just pause a bit to allow for the UI to catch up. I know that it is frowned upon to use Thread.sleep().

i.e. (pseudo-code)

page.setField("value");
page.save();
Thread.sleep(2000);
page.assertErrorMessage("Error message");

Is there any way let me check to see if a WebElement has been updated? If so, I could use the Selenium waits to test for that.

Or perhaps someone else has a suggestion for how to do this?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If the result displayed keeps getting every time you perform page.save().

The best way to make sure that your code waits for the browser to update the message is by using the WebDriverWait object.

A simple example would be –

new WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(ExpectedConditions.textToBePresentInElement(By.xpath("xpath"), "message"));

You can check if that particular element has the message you are looking for. If that message is not present even after 10 seconds then a TimedOutException will be thrown.

You can check out more variations on the ExpectedConditions as suitable in your situation. Hope this helps you.