Test dynamically loaded content with Selenium Web Driver

selenium webdriver selenium-webdriver gui-testing
Benjamin Ihrig picture Benjamin Ihrig · Oct 2, 2012 · Viewed 16.7k times · Source

I am working on a system that has a web based frontend that I am testing with Selenium. On one page the content is dynamically loaded when scrolling down (maybe you know that from Facebook's friend-list), because it is one of the requirements.

Scrolling down with Selenium Webdriver (I use Chrome) should be no problem via Javascript. But there is a problem with the dynamically added content. How can I make the Webdriver find those elements?

I tried the following to scroll down until no more content is loaded:

int oldSize = 0;
int newSize = 0;
do {
  driver.executeScript("window.scrollTo(0,document.body.scrollHeight)");
  newSize = driver.findElementsBy(By.cssSelector("selector").size();
} while(newSize > oldSize);

But though the page scrolls down the first time and some now content is loaded correctly, they will not be found by the drivers' findElementsBy(By) function.

Has someone ever faced this problem?? I'd be very glad if someone could help me figuring a solution for that!

Regards, Benjamin

Answer

StatusQuo picture StatusQuo · Oct 2, 2012

I would recommend using WebDriverWait with ExpectedConditons.

//scroll down with Javascript first
WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 30);
WebElement element = wait.until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By.cssSelector("selector")));
//interact with your element
element.click()

Take a look at the guidance provided by Selenium Official page: http://seleniumhq.org/docs/04_webdriver_advanced.html

Related questions

How to run Selenium WebDriver test cases in Chrome?

I tried this WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(); But i'm getting the error as Failed tests: setUp(com.TEST): The path to the driver executable must be set by the webdriver.chrome.driver system property; for more information, see code here . …

Read More
Get HTML Source of WebElement in Selenium WebDriver using Python

I'm using the Python bindings to run Selenium WebDriver: from selenium import webdriver wd = webdriver.Firefox() I know I can grab a webelement like so: elem = wd.find_element_by_css_selector('#my-id') And I know I can get …

Read More
How can I ask the Selenium-WebDriver to wait for few seconds in Java?

I'm working on a Java Selenium-WebDriver. I added driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(2, TimeUnit.SECONDS); and WebElement textbox = driver.findElement(By.id("textbox")); because my Applications takes few seconds to load the User Interface. So I set 2 seconds implicitwait. but I …

Read More