Watir implicit_wait doesn't seem to work

Question

We are currently using watir-webdriver (0.6.2) with firefox to run acceptance tests. Our tests take a long time to run, and often fail with timeout errors. We wanted to decrease the timeout time, for them to fail faster.

We tried:

browser = Watir::Browser.new("firefox")
browser.driver.manage.timeouts.implicit_wait=3 

However, we are still experiencing 30s timeouts.

We couldn't find any documentation or question regarding this issue. Does anyone know how to configure Watir waiting timeouts properly?

Answer 1

It depends exactly what you mean by 'timeout'. AFAIK there are three different definitions of timeout commonly discussed when talking about Watir-Webdriver:

1. How long does the browser wait for a page to load?
2. How long does Watir-Webdriver explicitly wait before considering an element 'not present' or 'not visible' when told to wait via the '.when_present' function
3. How long does Watir-Webdriver implicitly wait for an object to appear before considering an element 'not present' or 'not visible' (when not waiting via explicitly call see #2)

#1: Page load

Justin Ko is right that you can set page load timeout as described if your goal is to modify that, though it looks like the canonical way to do that is to set the client timeout before creating the browser and passing it to the browser on creation:

client = Selenium::WebDriver::Remote::Http::Default.new
client.timeout = 180 # seconds – default is 60

b = Watir::Browser.new :firefox, :http_client => client

- Alistair Scott, 'How do I change the page load Timeouts in Watir-Webdriver'

#2: Explicit timeout

But I think @p0deje is right in saying you are experiencing explicit timeouts, though it's not possible to say for sure without seeing your code. In the below I experienced the explicit declaration overriding the implicit (I am unsure if that's intentional):

b = Watir::Browser.new :firefox
b.driver.manage.timeouts.implicit_wait = 3 
puts Time.now #=> 2013-11-14 16:24:12 +0000
begin
  browser.link(:id => 'someIdThatIsNotThere').when_present.click
rescue => e
  puts e #=> timed out after 30 seconds, waiting for {:id=>"someIdThatIsNotThere", :tag_name=>"a"} to become present
end
puts Time.now #=> 2013-11-14 16:24:43 +0000

Watir-Webdriver will wait 30 seconds before failure by default thanks to 'when_present'. Alternatively you can say 'when_present(10)' to alter the default and wait 10 seconds. (Watir-Webdriver > Watir::Wait#when_present.) I can not divine any way to do this globally. Unless you find such a thing - and please tell me if you do - it must be done on each call. :( Edit: Fellow answerer Justin Ko gave me the answer as to how to do what I described above. Edit 2: @jarib added this to Watir, per @justinko in the linked answer: "Update: This monkey patch has been merged into watir-webdriver and so will no longer be needed in watir-webdriver v0.6.5. You will be able to set the timeout using: Watir.default_timeout = 90"

#3 Implicit timeout

The code you provided sets the time Watir-Webdriver will wait for any element to be come present without you explicitly saying so:

b = Watir::Browser.new :firefox
b.driver.manage.timeouts.implicit_wait = 3 
puts Time.now #=> 2013-11-14 16:28:33 +0000
begin
  browser.link(:id => 'someIdThatIsNotThere').when_present.click
rescue => e
  puts e #=> unable to locate element, using {:id=>"someIdThatIsNotThere", :tag_name=>"a"}
end
puts Time.now #=> 2013-11-14 16:28:39 +0000