Why use Page Factory?

Question

I am a new test engineer and have been reading about Page Object Model and implementing them and keep coming across Page Factory. I understand that Page Factory is a POM that provides additional features such as instantiating all elements when calling Page Factory and more readable code for tests (though I'm not completely sold on the readability). To be clear, I'm sold on POM. The reusability of the code and the relative ease of maintenance are great and I'm building in that direction.

The two questions I have come down to:

• Why do I want to instantiate all the elements instead of doing it on the fly?
• What are the advantages of Page Factory that I'm missing?

Answer 1

A few answers have said that the PageFactory "loads" all the WebElements when it is instantiated - this is not actually correct.

The elements don't load until you access them. It's done through the base classes and a RealProxy. It does use the standard FindElement(s)By methods under the hood, so there is no real performance benefit to having WebElements vs storing the By's and loading them when you need them.

One reason I choose to not use the PageFactory model, is I may have a search for an element that I don't want to exist, and by using the auto-wired approach, it searches to see if it exists before I can say "doesn't exist" in the test.

Another issue is there are subtle differences between how the PageFactory instantiates the WebElement and how Driver.FindBy instantiates them. One that bugs me is that PageFactory's version doesn't implement IWrapsDriver, meaning you can't get the driver used to find the element from the element. This may not seem like much, but it means when you want to write extensions to WebElement methods that in turn need a driver, you have to work out a (much more complicated) way of getting the driver, especially since I believe the PageObjectModel should not have a direct reference to the driver...

But that said, for a lot of cases, the out of the box PageFactory approach is very good. I think that the key to using- or not using- the PageFactory is just to have a consistent approach to how your test code and page object models work and interract - as that is key to maintainability.