I have had similar issues....
The best way to wait for some particular state of a WebElement is to use explicit waits. This is when you command the web driver to wait until some condition is met. To do this, you need to select one or more conditions provided by the ExpectedConditions class. Yes, I said one or more... Also, some people don't know that here is a way to negate these expected conditions. For example, let's assume I need to tell the web driver to wait until a button is clickable
WebDriver driver = ....; // obtain your web driver
WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 5); // wait max. of 5 seconds for condition to be reached
WebElement button = wait.until(ExpectedConditions.ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(LOCATOR)); // where LOCATOR is the strategy you want to use to locate a web element
The result of the until call will return something depending on the expected condition passed. Some conditions return a boolean, other return a single element, while others return a list of web elements. In this case, the expected condition is to return a single element. THEREFORE, you need to make absolutely sure that your LOCATOR locates a single component. Otherwise, it will return the first one it finds and that may or may not be the one you need.
As I mentioned before, the condition can be negated. Using the same example, how do you wait until the button is not clickable?
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.not(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(LOCATOR)));
Notice I placed the previous ExpectedConditions inside a not. This is how you negate the expected condition.
So, going back to the OP's question, how to do wait for an "iframe" to be closed? This depends on your specific situation. In my situation, I kicked off a process where an iframe is opened to upload some pictures and then a button is clicked to close it. Often times is that the next instruction in your Selenium test class or your Gherkins script is executed while the frame is in the process of closing. This results in an unstable condition when sometimes the next instruction succeeds and sometimes it fails because the time it takes the iframe to close is affected by other things (i.e. your server or test box is "running slow"). For those cases, it is a good practice to tell the driver to WAIT UNTIL the iframe is gone. What I have done is to write a condition that occurs after the clicking of the "close iframe" button.
button.click(); // my button click
WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 5);
boolean iframeGone = wait.until(ExpectedConditions.not(
ExpectedConditions.presenceOfElementLocated(LOCATOR)));
The not condition returns a boolean based on the expected condition it evaluates. In my case, the iframe is totally removed from the DOM when the "close iframe" button is clicked. This is different that checking for "visibility" because an invisible component can still be active. In the above snippet, if the wait conditions times out, it will throw a Selenium TimeoutException which is a form of RuntimeException so do not expect to be forced to handle it. That said, you should ABSOLUTELY handle it, but also you need to include a finally block to switch back to the parent frame. So, the correct structure for the code I showed you is
try {
// Execute the equivalent of the above code that fits your situation
} catch (TimeoutException e) {
// handle the exception (most likely mean your test failed)
} finally {
// switch to parent frame
driver.switchTo().parentFrame();
}
If you are already in the parent frame, there is not side effect of invoking this method. IF you are in a frame other than the parent frame, the web driver is not smart enough to acknowledge that your subsequent tests require it to be in the parent frame. You need to be explicit by informing the web driver which frame contains the web elements it needs to interact to in future test steps.
