Handling self-refreshing pages from selenium

Question

I have been running into intermittent errors with some java selenium-rc tests which I think are related to a page which has an ajax poll and automatically refreshes when some condition is reached on the server. In this scenario, I have no way of asking selenium to wait for the page to load, and so I run into a bunch of random "Couldn't access document.body" errors.

So, is there some way I can cause selenium to gracefully handle this situation? If not, is there some way I could detect whether the user is selenium from the page's javascript, and disable the automatic refresh?

If it helps at all, the javascript code in the page looks something like...

var ajax = new Ajax(url, { 
    update: state,
    method: 'get',
    onComplete: function(message) {
        if (some_condition) {
            window.location.replace(unescape(window.location));
        }
    }
});

Answer 1

In this scenario you could wait for the Ajax request to finish.

That way you don't concern yourself if the page is loaded. You continue after the ajax request is done.

You could do that this way:

        selenium.waitForCondition(
            "selenium.browserbot.getCurrentWindow().jQuery.active == 0",
            timeout);

Where timeout is an optional integer parameter.

Answer 2

If Hannibal's answer doesn't work, what has worked for me with pages that take a very long time to load, is adding calling a method either directly after the action which causes page to be refreshed, or, at the beginning of the next action, which checks to see if a particular element which will always be present on the page, is actually present.

Answer 3

The simple solution would be to have selenium execute a script to override/disable the javascript that self refreshes.
selenium rc is selenium 1, but regardless, javascript can be executed with both drivers.

That aside, @Hannibal has a pretty good solution, and I would most likely do it that way myself