The Selenium WebDriver's ExpectedConditions class provides users with common methods to check for specific conditions of elements on a page. Those conditions include such things as:
- Titles
- URLs
- Presence of elements
- Visibility of elements
- Text on elements
- Frames to switch to
- Invisibility of elements
- Element-clickable states
- Staleness of elements
- Refreshing elements
- Element selection states
- Alerts
- Number of windows
- Finding elements
- Attributes of elements
- Number of elements
- Nested elements
- JavaScript values
The JavaDoc for the ExpectedConditions class is located at https://seleniumhq.github.io/selenium/docs/api/java/org/openqa/selenium/support/ui/ExpectedConditions.html.
Using the ExpectedConditions class's methods is simple. You would just call them as follows:
ExpectedConditions.visibilityOf(WebElement element)
Alternatively, you can use:
ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By by)
These two methods do the same thing, except one takes a static locator as a parameter, and the second one takes a dynamically generated locator. But using these methods alone is not enough. It is imperative to wait "up to" a designated time period before throwing an exception that the element is not found. This can be done by passing the result of these methods to the WebDriverWait class's methods.