What is the best wait strategy in Selenium for interacting with a WebElement

Question

I just started with implementing some UItests for a new WebApplication and noticed that sometimes tests are failing when I wait for an Element to Exist while the same test succeeds when waiting for the Element to be Visible.

So my question is, is there a fixed order in which a webelement becomes "existing", "clickable", "visible","displayed" etc. or does this fully depends on how the developer has implemented the webpage or maybe the JS Framework which is used implementing the application?

Answer 1

It all depends on how the page was written. Web element does not evolve from one status to another. It may change, but as a result of some dynamic content, actions performed on the page etc.

What those statuses tell us:

1. Existing - is when the element is in the page DOM. It does not necessarily has to be visible or interactable. It is the basic status, as element cannot have other statuses, without existing. Using the driver.FindElement(By.Xpath(".//*")) will find all elements on the page.
2. Displayed - when element exists it may be visible. Use IWebElement.Displayed (C# syntax) to check if the element is displayed.
3. Clickable - sometimes when you try to click the element, the exception may be thrown, saying that something else would get the click. To deal with those issues, see this answer.

How do you check if the element exists? If you are just searching for element, it will throw exception, when element is not found. I suggest using WebDriverWait, to look for element, for certain time period, to deal with loading:

Wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, new TimeSpan(0, 0, timeoutSecond));
Wait.Until(d => d.FindElement(by));