I have a web application to test with Selenium. There is a lot of JavaScript running on page load.
This JavaScript code is not so well written but I can't change anything.
So waiting for an element to appear in the DOM with findElement()
method is not an option.
I want to create a generic function in Java to wait for a page to load, a possible solution would be:
- run a JavaScript script form WebDriver and store the result of
document.body.innerHTML
in a string variablebody
. - compare the
body
variable to the previous version ofbody
. if they are the same then set increment a counternotChangedCount
otherwise setnotChangedCount
to zero. - wait for a litte time (50 ms for example).
- if the page has not changed for some time (500 ms for example) so
notChangedCount >= 10
then exit the loop otherwise loop to the first step.
Do you think it's a valid solution?
Best Answer
If anyone actually knew a general and always-applicable answer, it would have been implemented everywhere ages ago and would make our lives SO much easier.
There are many things you can do, but every single one of them has a problem:
As Ashwin Prabhu said, if you know the script well, you can observe its behaviour and track some of its variables on
window
ordocument
etc. This solution, however, is not for everyone and can be used only by you and only on a limited set of pages.Your solution by observing the HTML code and whether it has or hasn't been changed for some time is not bad (also, there is a method to get the original and not-edited HTML directly by
WebDriver
), but:setTimeout()
) and work again and again and could possibly change the HTML every time they run. Seriously, every "Web 2.0" page does it. Even Stack Overflow. You could overwrite the most common methods used and consider the scripts that use them as completed, but ... you can't be sure.innerHTML
fun.There are tools to help you on this. Namely Progress Listeners together with nsIWebProgressListener and some others. The browser support for this, however, is horrible. Firefox began to try to support it from FF4 onwards (still evolving), IE has basic support in IE9.
And I guess I could come up with another flawed solution soon. The fact is - there's no definite answer on when to say "now the page is complete" because of the everlasting scripts doing their work. Pick the one that serves you best, but beware of its shortcomings.