Process page, or be notified that elements are present even if page not fully loaded

Question

The page I'm using watir-webdriver on will often not load completely for maybe like a minute because of the many external scripts I'm loading/using. This of course means that I have to wait needlessly for a minute when I could have performed the checks I wanted to in 10 seconds after the browser I'm controlling (Firefox) started loading the page.

I noticed that even though my target elements become immediately available in the page, the browser.div(:id => 'some_id').present? method hangs until the page is fully loaded. I noticed that if I press on the stop button in the browser window, watir will immediately continue successfully with my tests (the present? method un-hangs). Is there a way to avoid this behavior of the present? method and be able to tell that my target elements are present without having to wait for the page to fully load?

Kieran Edwards Kieran Edwards · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-03T09:11:58

I've experienced this issue before as well. The method I employed, which rides on the idea you mentioned about hitting the stop button, is as follows:

begin
  browser.wait_until{browser.div(:id => 'some_id').present?}
rescue
  browser.send_keys :escape
end

expect(browser.div(:id=> 'some_id').present?).to be true

This, by default, gives that div 30 seconds to appear (you can insert a smaller value then 30 if you prefer), otherwise it causes watir to hit 'escape' which will stop any remaining background page loading and resume the test.

Process page, or be notified that elements are present even if page not fully loaded

2 Answers