Question

Is there a way how to test if an element is present? Any findElement method would end in an exception, but that is not what I want, because it can be that an element is not present and that is okay. That is not a fail of the test, so an exception can not be the solution.

I’ve found this post: Selenium C# WebDriver: Wait until element is present.

But this is for C#, and I am not very good at it. What would the code be in Java? I tried it out in Eclipse, but I didn’t get it right into Java code.

This is the code:

public static class WebDriverExtensions{
    public static IWebElement FindElement(this IWebDriver driver, By by, int timeoutInSeconds){

        if (timeoutInSeconds > 0){
            var wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(timeoutInSeconds));
            return wait.Until(drv => drv.FindElement(by));
        }

        return driver.FindElement(by);
    }
}

Answer 1

Use findElements instead of findElement.

findElements will return an empty list if no matching elements are found instead of an exception.

To check that an element is present, you could try this

Boolean isPresent = driver.findElements(By.yourLocator).size() > 0

This will return true if at least one element is found and false if it does not exist.

The official documentation recommends this method:

findElement should not be used to look for non-present elements, use findElements(By) and assert zero length response instead.