how to check if page finished loading in RSelenium

Question

Imagine that you click on an element using RSelenium on a page and would like to retrieve the results from the resulting page. How does one check to make sure that the resulting page has loaded? I can insert Sys.sleep() in between processing the page and clicking the element but this seems like a very ugly and slow way to do things.

Answer 1

Set ImplicitWaitTimeout and then search for an element on the page. From ?remoteDriver

setImplicitWaitTimeout(milliseconds = 10000)

Set the amount of time the driver should wait when searching for elements. When searching for a single element, the driver will poll the page until an element is found or the timeout expires, whichever occurs first. When searching for multiple elements, the driver should poll the page until at least one element is found or the timeout expires, at which point it will return an empty list. If this method is never called, the driver will default to an implicit wait of 0ms.

Answer 2

In the RSelenium reference manual (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RSelenium/RSelenium.pdf), you will find the method setTimeout() for the remoteDriver class:

setTimeout(type = "page load", milliseconds = 10000)

Configure the amount of time that a particular type of operation can execute for before they are aborted and a |Timeout| error is returned to the client.

type: The type of operation to set the timeout for. Valid values are: "script" for script timeouts, "implicit" for modifying the implicit wait timeout and "page load" for setting a page load timeout. Defaults to "page load"

milliseconds: The amount of time, in milliseconds, that time-limited commands are permitted to run. Defaults to 10000 milliseconds.

This seems to suggests that remDr$setTimeout() after remDr$navigate("...") would actually wait for the page to load, or return a timeout error after 10 seconds.