Introduction:

One of the Important Factor in test automation for a complex web application is to ensure that the flow of the test cases should be in synchronization Webdriverwait selenium with the application under test (AUT).

When tests are run, the application may not always respond with the same speed. For example, it might take a few seconds for a progress bar to reach 100 percent, a status message to appear, a button to become enabled, and a window or pop-up message to open. We can handle these anticipated timing problems by synchronizing our test to ensure that Webdriverwait selenium until our application is ready before performing a certain action. There are several options that we can use to synchronize our test.

I would be discussing the important aspect of different wait types in selenium automation process. I have seen that there is a huge confusion in understanding different wait types and its significance. So this blog would exclusively explain what are the different wait types.

There are basically three wait types in selenium automation:

1. Implicit Wait type.
2. Explicit Wait type.
3. Fluent Wait type.

Implicit Wait Type:

Implicit wait in selenium has borrowed the idea of ‘Implicit Wait’ type from Watir. Selenium webdriver wait for page to load this basically tells selenium to wait for a certain amount of time before throwing an exception that it cannot find the element of the page. We should note that the implicit wait will be in place fir the entire time the browser is open. This means that any search for elements on the page by the webdriver should take the time the implicit wait is for.  If we do not provide selenium with this wait then Selenium would start throwing ElementNotFound exception because the time taken for selenium to interact with the corresponding element in the browser was not given. This is applicable for all the web elements in the browser. For example

from selenium import webdriver

class BrowserInteractions():
    def test(self):
        driver = webdriver.Firefox()
        driver.get('https://google.com
        driver.implicitly_wait(10)

Explicit Wait Type:

Explicit wait in selenium is more extendable in the means that you can set it up to wait for any specific condition. Usually we use the expected conditions selenium object to specify the condition to provide the corresponding explicit wait. For example

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

class BrowserInteractions():
    def test(self):
       driver = webdriver.Chrome()
       driver.get('http://www.quora.com/Kevin-Rose
       element = WebDriverWait(driver, 2).
       until(EC.presence_of_element_located
       ((By.PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT, "Followers")))
       element.click()

Fluent Wait Type:

Fluent wait in selenium is a part of the Explicit Wait type. Fluent Wait instance defines the maximum amount of time to wait for a condition as well the frequency with which to check the condition. For example

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.common.exceptions import *
import time

class ExplicitWait():
    def test(self):
        baseURL = "http://www.cleartrip.com/"
        bin_path = "/usr/local/bin/chromedriver"
        driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=bin_path)
        driver.get(baseURL)
        driver.implicitly_wait(.5)
        driver.maximize_window()
        input_from = driver.find_element(By.ID,"FromTag
        input_from.send_keys("blr")
        input_to = driver.find_element(By.ID,"ToTag
        input_to.send_keys("ccu")
        input_depart_date = driver.find_element(By.ID,"DepartDate
        input_depart_date.send_keys("Sun, 4 Jun, 2017")
        input_depart_date.send_keys(Keys.ENTER)

        input_searchBtn = driver.find_element(By.ID,"SearchBtn
        input_searchBtn.click()
        wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10, poll_frequency=1,
        ignored_exceptions=[NoSuchElementException,
                            ElementNotVisibleException,
                            ElementNotSelectableException])
        element = wait.until(EC.
        element_to_be_clickable((By.ID,"1_1_MULTI
        element.click()
        time.sleep(2)
        driver.quit()

ew = ExplicitWait()
ew.test()

This selenium testing tutorial is a very important concept when we are performing automation using Selenium and I hope I was able to clear the difference between the three wait types.