How do I reliably check the current page after navigation in Selenium WebDriver? - selenium-webdriver

Question

In my web tests using Selenium WebDriver and IEDriverServer.exe 2.32.3.0, I need to check the title of the current page after navigating to a certain URL. Here's the code:
_webDriver.Navigate().GoToUrl("...");
Assert.That(_webDriver.Title, Is.EqualTo("..."));
This sometimes works, but sporadically breaks - the title is not as expected (but still the one from the page before).
I've read on StackOverflow (C# Webdriver - Page Title assert fails before page loads) that IWebDriver.Title property does not auto-wait for navigation to complete (why doesn't it?), but instead you need to manually wait using the WebDriverWait API.
I implemented manual waiting for the title:
var wait = new WebDriverWait(_webDriver, TimeSpan.FromSeconds (3.0));
wait.Until(d => d.Title == expectedTitle);
However, this sometimes waits for 3 seconds, then throws a WebDriverTimeoutException. The build agent running the code is quite fast and the web site I'm testing is trivial (just starting development), so I'm quite sure that it can't really take 3 seconds to navigate. I noticed that on the other StackOverflow question, the original poster also got the WebDriverTimeoutException and just caught and ignored it.
I found that solution a little flaky, so I tried a different workaround. I gave the <title> attribute an ID in my HTML and used IWebDriver.FindElement, which is supposed to wait for the page to complete:
Assert.That(_webDriver.FindElement(By.Id(ViewIDs.Shared._Layout.Title)).Text, Is.EqualTo(page.ExpectedTitle));
At first, that seemed to work. However, it doesn't reliably, it sometimes throws:
OpenQA.Selenium.NoSuchElementException : Unable to find element with id == _Layout-title
at OpenQA.Selenium.Remote.RemoteWebDriver.UnpackAndThrowOnError(Response errorResponse)
at OpenQA.Selenium.Remote.RemoteWebDriver.Execute(String driverCommandToExecute, Dictionary`2 parameters)
at OpenQA.Selenium.Remote.RemoteWebDriver.FindElement(String mechanism, String value)
at OpenQA.Selenium.By.FindElement(ISearchContext context)
at ...
(I also tried upgrading to WebDriver/IEDriverServer 2.33.0.0; but in that version, the text of the <title> tag is always empty...)
Hence my question. How do I reliably check the current page after navigation in Selenium WebDriver? Is there a good pattern that works?

Answer 1

I just solved it with stuff I derived from something I found on CodeProject:
private void WaitUntilLoaded()
{
var wait = new OpenQA.Selenium.Support.UI.WebDriverWait(driver, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(%));
wait.Until(x =>
{
return ((IJavaScriptExecutor)this.driver)
.ExecuteScript("return document.readyState").Equals("complete");
});
}
According to w3schools it works for most popular browsers.
As I presently test on Firefox I ended up on Mozilla's own page about how to recognise a page as loaded. IMHO read worth to avoid dragons.
That gave me
wait.Until(p => p.FindElement(
By.Id("somethingThatIsDisplayedWhenMyAsyncronousStuffIsFinished")
).Displayed);
which saved my day.

Answer 2

I have run into very similar issues. I still have not been able to tell why but often if you try to use an element without doing a isElementPresent check it will fail occasionally. My solution is mildly "expensive" but I have not found a reliable alternative as yet.
My example is in java, shouldn't be hard to translate but I don't have the libraries.
waitForElement("_Layout-title", 45);
then continue with your code
Assert.That(_webDriver.FindElement(By.Id(ViewIDs.Shared._Layout.Title)).Text, Is.EqualTo(page.ExpectedTitle));
This tries a set number of times, in this case 45, to find the element. Once id=_Layout-title is present it will continue to the next line of code and do the assert. While it isn't perfect, it did make my test much more stable.