Various Waits Available in Selenium with Python

While working with Selenium, there may be situations when we see that after page load action by the browser, the web elements are getting loaded at various intervals of time.

This type of situation leads to syncing problems between Selenium and the web element on the page. The identification of elements does not happen due to the absence of that element in DOM. The exception like ElementNotVisibleException is thrown due to this.

The wait concept in Selenium overcomes this problem and gives a delay between elements identification and actions performed on them. Selenium web driver supports mainly two types of waits −

• Implicit wait

This is a global wait applied to all the elements on the page. The wait time is provided as arguments to the method. For example, if the wait time is 5 seconds, it shall wait this period of time before throwing a timeout exception.

An implicit wait is a dynamic wait which means if the element is available at the third second, then we shall move to the next step of the test case instead of waiting for the entire five seconds.

An implicit wait informs the web driver to poll for a specific amount of time. Once this time is determined, it remains for the entire driver session. The default time of an implicit wait is 0.

Syntax

driver.implicitly_wait(8)

• Explicit wait

The explicit wait is applied not to all but to a specific element on the page. It is actually a condition which has to be met before moving to the next step of the test case.

The explicit wait is also a dynamic in nature which means the wait will be there as long as necessary. Thus if the wait time is five seconds and our given condition is satisfied at the third second, we need not halt the execution for the next two seconds.

The webdriverWait class along with expected_conditions is used to create an explicit wait. The webdriverWait class can call the ExpectedCondition after every 500ms by default for checking if the condition is met.

Syntax

w = WebDriverWait(driver, 6)
w.until(expected_conditions.presence_of_element_located((By.CLASS_NA
ME, "Tutorialspoint")))

The expected conditions commonly used in explicit wait are listed below −

• title_contains
• visibility_of_element_located
• presence_of_element_located
• title_is
• visibility_of
• element_selection_state_to_be/
• presence_of_all_elements_located
• element_located_to_be_selected
• alert_is_present
• element_located_selection_state_to_be

Example

Code Implementation with implicit wait.

from selenium import webdriver
#browser exposes an executable file
#Through Selenium test we will invoke the executable file which will then
#invoke actual browser
driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path="C:\chromedriver.exe")
#setting implicit wait 10 seconds
driver.implicitly_wait(10)
# to maximize the browser window
driver.maximize_window()
#get method to launch the URL
driver.get("https://www.tutorialspoint.com/index.htm")
#to refresh the browser
driver.refresh()
# identifying the edit box with the help of id
driver.find_element_by_id("gsc-i-id1").send_keys("Selenium")
#to close the browser
driver.close()

Example

Code Implementation with explicit wait.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions
from selenium.webdriver.support.wait import WebDriverWait
#browser exposes an executable file
#Through Selenium test we will invoke the executable file which will then
#invoke actual browser
driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path="C:\chromedriver.exe")
#setting implicit wait 10 seconds
driver.implicitly_wait(10)
# to maximize the browser window
driver.maximize_window()
driver.get("https://www.tutorialspoint.com/tutor_connect/index.php")
#to refresh the browser
driver.refresh()
# identifying the link with the help of link text locator
driver.find_element_by_link_text("Search Tutors").click()
w.(expected_conditions.presence_of_element_located((By.
CSS_SELECTOR, "input#txtFilterLocation")))
#to close the browser
driver.close()