Question

In my application when I open page X I expect to see either element A or element B. They are placed in different locations in DOM and can be found using their ids, for example driver.findElement(By.id("idA"))

How can I ask webdriver to find either A or B?

There is method driver.findElements(By) which will stop waiting when at least one element is found, but this method forces me to use the same locator for A and B.

What is the proper way to reliably find either A or B, so that I don’t have to wait implicit timeout?

Answer 1

Element with id I1 or element with id I2

xpath: //E1[@id=I1] | //E2[@id=I2]

css: css=E1#I1,E2#I2

driver.findElement(By.xpath(//E1[@id=I1] | //E2[@id=I2]))
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector(E1#I1,E2#I2))

don’t forget about fluentWait mechanism:

public WebElement fluentWait(final By locator){

        Wait<WebDriver> wait = new FluentWait<WebDriver>(driver)
                .withTimeout(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
                .pollingEvery(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
                .ignoring(org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchElementException.class);

        WebElement foo = wait.until(
                new Function<WebDriver, WebElement>() {
                    public WebElement apply(WebDriver driver) {
                        return driver.findElement(locator);
                    }
                }
        );
        return  foo;
};

you can get more info about fluentWait here

IMHO solution to your issue be like:

fluentWait(By.xpath(//E1[@id=I1] | //E2[@id=I2]));
fluentWait(By.cssSelector(E1#I1,E2#I2))

FYI: here is nice xpath,cssSelector manual

hope this helps you.