Expected conditions in protractor

Question

While writing selenium tests in Python, I got used to using Explicit Waits a lot for waiting for a page to load, or for waiting for an element to become visible, or clickable etc:

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

element = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
    EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, "myDynamicElement"))
)

The key concept here is providing an Expected Condition to wait for, there are multiple types:

• text_to_be_present_in_element_value
• element_to_be_clickable
• alert_is_present
• etc

Using Expected Conditions makes the code cleaner and more reliable comparing to using sleeps with hardcoded time intervals.

Now, we are switching our end-to-end testing infrastructure to protractor a lot.

Are there similar Expected Conditions in protractor as there are in python-selenium or java-selenium? If not, what is the canonical way to explicitly wait for a condition in protractor?

^{I've looked through protractor documentation and found nothing about it.}

Answer 1

Once feat(expectedConditions) is in (probably protractor 1.7), you can do:

var EC = protractor.ExpectedConditions;
var e = element(by.id('xyz'));
browser.wait(EC.presenceOf(e), 10000);
expect(e.isPresent()).toBeTruthy();

Please note though, if you're working with an Angular app and your test requires these conditional waits, it's a big red flag for what you're doing, as protractor should handle waits natively.

Answer 2

In Protractor you can use browser.wait(fn, timeout).

Example:

var element = by.id('myDynamicElement');
browser.wait(function() {
  return ptor.isElementPresent(element);
}, 10000);

expect(ptor.isElementPresent(element)).toBeTruthy();