How to tell Detox to wait for my elements to appear

Question

My view takes a second to load in after an event. When calling:

expect(element(by.id('my-view'))).toBeVisible()

sometimes detox finds this element and sometimes it does not. How do I tell detox to wait for the elements to appear?

Answer 1

You can use the waitFor function with a timeout you define:

await waitFor(element(by.id('my-view'))).toBeVisible().withTimeout(5000)

this tells detox to wait 5000ms before failing.

See example here: https://github.com/wix/Detox/blob/master/docs/Troubleshooting.RunningTests.md#test-tries-to-find-my-component-before-its-created