selenium c# - “lazy” driver.FindElements(By..)

Question

In my effort of trying to find a neat way to validate which buttons are visible to the user based on his Role and Permissions i have encountered a problem. I am using the Page Object Model design pattern with selenium to test a website. A few pages have a different set of buttons which should either be visible or not to the user according to his role.

I keep a Dictionary<Permission,IWebElement> and initialize it in the constructor of the page (class representing a certain page in the site).

All web elements are defined as follows:

private IWebElement btn_openShop => driver.ById("open_shop");

(ById is equivalent to FindsElement(By.Id("open_shop") )

The problem is that if the button shouldn't exist an exception is thrown when adding it to the Dictionary.

Note: moving the initialization of the Dictionary wont help since i test both cases (one in which the user should see the button and one in which he shouldn't).

Answer 1

I changed the Dictionary to be of type <Permission,Lazy<IWebElement>> and added items to it as follows:

dictionary.Add(somePermission,new Lazy<IWebElement>(()=>the button))

Edit: this technique works but it seems that when debugging in visual studio the code crashes. Any thoughts? (no exceptions are thrown during test execution).