Question

I am using the Ruby interpretation of Webdriver. Now the webpage I am looking at may or may not contain a certain element. If it doesn’t I would like to look for another element. However, whenever Webdriver can’t find an element it throws an exception.

My question is, can I check to see if the element even exists on the page without littering my code with begin/rescue blocks ?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The short answer is no. To check if element exists, you have to rescue errors. find_element always throw NoSuchElementError if element was not found. You can for example take a look at implementation of #exists? method in Watir-WebDriver.

Still, you can use find_elements method which will return empty array if not elements were found.

elements = @browser.find_elements(id: 'doesnt-exist')
if elements.empty?
  # go to the next element
else
  # work with element
  element = elements.first
  element.click
end