Selenium scan page for error elements while waiting

Question

Ok, I'm not sure there is a ready solution to what my problem is, but essentially the website I am trying to do automated testing on is prone to "System Error"'s. I have a state machine that navigates through various webpages to get a desired result.

The crux of the issue is that selenium is doing a 120 second timeout while waiting for an element on the page but all the page has on it is the big "System Error" instead.

I already have some framework set up that can scan a page for the system errors and throw a CriticalPageException if it finds this. However, I want to be able to scan for this error in the WebDriverWait.

Is there a way to do this in the Java version of Selenium, or am I sol?

Answer 1

We had a similar issue. What we did was created a custom waitForWebElement method that polls the site, you could do something similar

public WebElement waitForWebElement(final By by, final boolean isDisplayed) {
    // Waiting 30 seconds for an element to be present on the page, checking
    // for its presence once every 5 seconds.
    Wait<SearchContext> wait = new FluentWait<SearchContext>(getSearchElement()).withTimeout(timeout, TimeUnit.SECONDS).pollingEvery(pollSeconds, TimeUnit.SECONDS).ignoring(NoSuchElementException.class);

    WebElement webElement = wait.until(new Function<SearchContext, WebElement>() {
        public WebElement apply(SearchContext search) {
            try{
                WebElement element = search.findElement(by);
            catch(NoSuchElementException e){
                if(CHECK_YOUR_ERROR_PRESENT){
                    throw CriticalPageException()
                }else{
                    throw e;
                }
            }               
            return element;
        }
    });

    return webElement;
}

EDIT : getSearchElement() just returns your search context