Selenium c#: Wait Until Element is Present Without Waiting the Time Given, Else Time Out

Question

To explain further, I am currently working with selenium and c#. My problem is, my tool runs very fast without waiting the element to be ready.

Thread.Sleep() is not advisable for instance.

The given time to wait is 2 secs. the element will be present in 1 or more secs. after the Thread.Sleep() so the code line is not reliable.

Or the element is present but still waiting to finish Thread.Sleep() so it is time consuming.

What I want is, if the element is found then no need to wait on the given time, and if not found at the given time then time out.

Answer 1

This is exactly what explicit wait and expected conditions are for.

Uses example

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5));
IWebElement element = wait.Until(ExpectedConditions.ElementIsVisible(By locator));

This will wait up to 5 seconds for the element to be visible. If successful the element will be returned, if not it will throw TimeoutException .

Update

ExpectedConditions has moved and is now located in SeleniumExtras.WaitHelpers

'ExpectedConditions' is obsolete: 'The ExpectedConditions implementation in the .NET bindings is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. This portion of the code has been migrated to the DotNetSeleniumExtras repository on GitHub ( https://github.com/DotNetSeleniumTools/DotNetSeleniumExtras )'

To avoid many changes in the existing code import the ExpectedConditions to a variable called ExpectedConditions . The rest of the code remains the same

using ExpectedConditions = SeleniumExtras.WaitHelpers.ExpectedConditions;