Sele – consolidatedchaos

In general the website response times may cause issues while doing the UI automation testing. Most of the times test scripts will fail due to synchronizations issues from web-driver and the application web elements.

Following are the common reasons and if we see very frequent issues in synchronization it is suggested to do performance testing and tuning.

Location from where we are accessing the application (Latency)
Network bandwidth
Too much firewall checks
Website architecture and technology on which website built on.

Most of these cases are taken care while doing performance tuning and performance engineering, but yet we see page load issues, element enabling issues and visibility issues while doing UI automation.

In selenium we have several methods that we can use to make sure that these things are taken care. Following is the just enough explanation about waits in Selenium driver.

Implicit waits will wait until the defined action (example page loading ) is complete.

Example of it is managed time outs, and they are defined at driver level.

Driver.Manage().Timeouts().ImplicitWait = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30);
Driver.Manage().Timeouts().PageLoad = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30);

When we want to wait explicitly at certain number of seconds we will use explicit waits. As the name suggests the test execution will be halted during this time. Example of it is sleep

 Thread.Sleep(2000);

here the parameter indicates the number of milliseconds to wait for.

The other case of waiting for dynamic web elements is using wait until or web driver waits. These are most common implicit waits that are used. There are two ways we can use these.

We can declare the web driver wait and and it will wait for max wait in this case it is 30 seconds, and repeatedly we can check for the expected conditions i this case we are looking for visibility of the element google search text box.

IWebElement textbox;
WebDriverWait waits = new WebDriverWait(Driver, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30));
textbox = waits.Until(SeleniumExtras
.WaitHelpers
.ExpectedConditions
.ElementIsVisible((By.Name(SEARCH_TEXT_BOX_NAME))));

There is another way we can use this as function delegate, following is how it is used.

//there is another way using function delegate
//delegate parameters and return value = new delegate parameters return value of passed parameters
//delegate is on the fly function generator
Func<IWebDriver,IWebElement>checkForvisibilityOfWebElement = new Func<IWebDriver, IWebElement>((IWebDriver Driver) =>
  {
     IWebElement textBoxDelegate = Driver.FindElement(By.Name(SEARCH_TEXT_BOX_NAME));
       if (textBoxDelegate.Displayed)
           return textBoxDelegate;
       else
          return null;
   }); 
 
 textbox = waits.Until(checkForvisibilityOfWebElement);

When you look at above code, its function delegate takes one argument as IWebDriver and returns the IWebElement. The last argument of function delegate is always a return type.

The wait until function will take this and checks for the condition mentioned in the delegate periodically.

If you look at the until you can clearly see this text.

WaitUntill

But if we look closely, the description says it will throw exception if it is not listed in the Ignore Exception list.

For that purpose. We have to configure our waits object what exceptions that we want to ignore while we periodically check for our condition. We can achieve this by following.

IWebElement textbox;
WebDriverWait waits = new WebDriverWait(Driver, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30));

waits.IgnoreExceptionTypes(typeof(NoSuchElementException));
waits.IgnoreExceptionTypes(typeof(ElementNotSelectableException));

There are list of exceptions that we may want to ignore, following is the snap shot.

ExceptionList

And finally following is the list of element states we can wait for.

ListOfwaitsfor

Please comment if you see anything is incorrect or you want to add something you know. Thank you.

In this part lets look at creating the page objects in most generic way.

As discussed in the last post the selenium support of page object initiation is getting deprecated from next releases of the selenium. So lets create page objects in most generic format.

HomePage

In the above class, we are declaring the all const string or identification strings may be xpath or ids or css selectors as const strings.

And we are assuming that driver object is being sent to the class. We are creating class property as driver and assigning the sent driver while creating the page class object from test. So the constructor of the page class takes one parameter driver, also if you look at it it take parameter type IWebDriver that means, any type of driver which implements IWebDriver is good enough, this will make class independent of the driver type.

HomePage2

In the above code we have created the web elements as properties of the class

And the actions as methods. We can create the elements in the methods as well. But to make differentiation between actions and elements, its good practice to keep the elements as properties.

I am not creating utility class as of now to keep the common methods in there, also there is no BasePage which has global objects of the application. We can very well do that, but for the simplicity , I have not added additional classes which makes it bit complex to understand the execution flow.

Similar to the above the class, we can create search results page and validation of the search results page in another class called GoogleSearchResults.

SearchResultsPage