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The goal of my test is to assert that a popup does not appear after certain actions. Previously to test if the popup exist, i have used exception handling.

try:

    self.driver.find_element_by_id("fancybox-close").click()

except Exception ('ElementNotVisibleException'):

    print "No popup"

This works fine for the test : to assert if popup exists.

But as soon as i change the goal to : assert if popup does not exist

the exception handling solution becomes very expensive (exception handling takes a lot of time in python) and a test that would execute in 3 secs now takes up to a minute.

Is there a way around this? A quicker way to check if an element does not exist using webdriver python binding ?

share|improve this question
How many times would you estimate that code fragment is executed over the course of your one-minute test? – user246 Jul 17 '12 at 14:20
It is just executed once, but it just stalls on the "except" part for 90% of the 1 minute. – user1411110 Jul 17 '12 at 19:42
That sounds suspicious. On modern hardware, I would expect "slow" exception handling to mean additional microseconds, or perhaps even additional milliseconds, but certainly not 54 seconds. – user246 Jul 17 '12 at 22:57
I should probably use a profiler to get the exact time spent in that try/catch block . But from past test results, the test where no exception was raised ran within 4 - 8 secs while the one where it was raised ran for about a minute or just over. There were no other changes in the code. – user1411110 Jul 17 '12 at 23:23

1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote accepted

I haven't used the Python bindings, but as far as I know they should be equivalent to the Java ones.

If I were you I would try to find the Python equivalents of findElements() and isDisplayed() that are available in the Java bindings.

For example, I would do something similar to this:

// ...
myElementList = driver.findElements(By.Id("fancybox-close"))
if (myElementList.isEmpty()) {
    // The element doesn't exist. findElements, in plural, returns a list of the matching elements, or an empty list if no one is found
else {
    // We know it exists, now we need to know if it's displayed (visible) or not
    if (myElementList[0].isDisplayed()) {
        // This means the element is visible
    else {
        // ...
    }

}

Hope it helps

share|improve this answer
Ignacio, this is a great idea. python bindings have a find_elements() and is_displayed(). I am however having trouble with checking if the list is empty or not. I get an error message saying "built in function id is not JSON serializable. Will have to look in it. But otherwise this is a great idea. Thanks! – user1411110 Jul 17 '12 at 19:39
isEmpty() is a Java method for lists. In Python, I think you should check the length of the list (len(driver.find_elements(...)) == 0)? I cannot check this for myself right now. – Ignacio Contreras Jul 17 '12 at 19:43
In python to check if the list is empty you just have to do if not a : where a =[] is a list. That is what i am doing. if not self.driver.find_elements(By.id("fancybox-close")) : – user1411110 Jul 17 '12 at 19:53
And it doesn't work? – Ignacio Contreras Jul 17 '12 at 19:56
1  
Cool. Now you should look for an equivalent of isDisplayed() (if an element is not displayed it will throw the exception you were using when clicked) for Python as I said in the answer :) – Ignacio Contreras Jul 17 '12 at 20:18
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