webdriver wait for ajax request in python

Question

Currently I am writing webdriver test for search which uses ajax for suggestions. Test works well if I add explicit wait after typing the search content and before pressing enter.

wd.find_element_by_xpath("//div[@class='searchbox']/input").send_keys("obama")
time.sleep(2)
wd.find_element_by_xpath("//div[@class='searchbox']/input").send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

but

wd.find_element_by_xpath("//div[@class='searchbox']/input").send_keys("obama")
wd.find_element_by_xpath("//div[@class='searchbox']/input").send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

fails. I am running tests on ec2 with 1 virtual cpu. I am suspecting, I pressed enter even before GET requests related to search are sent and if I press enter before suggestions, it fails.

Is there any better way that adding explicit waits?

Answer 1

You indeed can add an explicit wait for the presence of an element like

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait # available since 2.4.0
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC # available since 2.26.0

ff = webdriver.Firefox()
ff.get("http://somedomain/url_that_delays_loading")
ff.find_element_by_xpath("//div[@class='searchbox']/input").send_keys("obama")

try:
    element = WebDriverWait(ff, 10).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, "keywordSuggestion")))
finally:
    ff.find_element_by_xpath("//div[@class='searchbox']/input").send_keys(Keys.RETURN)
    ff.quit()

See: http://docs.seleniumhq.org/docs/04_webdriver_advanced.jsp#explicit-and-implicit-waits