Question

Super newbie here.

I am testing a page that either returns a list of tweets, or if none are available, a no results page. So I have two possible acceptable outcomes. I am trying to write an assert in Selenium 2 that tests for either element, but if neither appears, return an error.

I am using the page object model and I wrote the following:

Assert.assertTrue((iu.twitterUsername().isDisplayed()) || (iu.noData().isDisplayed()), "Page is not loading")

However, I am getting an element not found on the first part of my OR statement when the no data page is displayed. I thought the point of ‘isDisplayed’ was to check if the element is there. Why am I getting an element not found error? Obviously its not there, and I want to move onto the second part of my OR statement.

Is there a better way to write this when there are two possible acceptable results?

Answer 1

The WebElement.isDisplayed() method doesn’t tell you whether or not an element is there; it tells you whether it is displayed on the page (as opposed to being hidden).

You can use the WebDriver.findElement() method to test whether or not an element has loaded; it will throw a NoSuchElementException if it hasn’t. Your method might look like this:

public static boolean isElementLoaded(WebDriver driver, By findBy) {
    try {
        driver.findElement(findBy));
    } catch (NoSuchElementException e) {
        return false;
    } 
    return true;     
}

You can alter how long WebDriver waits for the element to load with something like the following, which changes it to five seconds:

driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS);

Alternatively, you can create a method that will poll for the element until a timeout is reached.