31. How to use implicit wait in selenium webdriver and why?

There are 2 types of waits available in Webdriver/Selenium 2 software testing tool. One of them is Implicit wait and another one is explicit wait. Both (Implicit wait and explicit wait) are useful for waiting in WebDriver. Using waits, we are telling WebDriver to wait for a certain amount of time before going to next step

Why Need Implicit Wait In WebDriver

As you knows sometimes, some elements takes some time to appear on software web application page when browser is loading the page. In this case, sometime your webdriver test will fail if you have not applied Implicit wait in your test case. If implicit wait is applied in your test case then webdriver will wait for specified amount of time if targeted element not appears on page.

If you write implicit wait statement in you webdriver software testing script then it will be applied automatically to all elements of your test case. I am suggesting you to use Implicit wait in your all test script of software web application with 10 to 15 seconds. In webdriver, Implicit wait statement is as bellow.

How To Write Implicit Wait In WebDriver

driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(15, TimeUnit.SECONDS);

Above statement will tell webdriver to wait for 15 seconds if targeted element not found/not appears on page. Le we look at simple example to understand implicit wait better.

package Others;

import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;

import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;

import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.ExpectedConditions;

import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.WebDriverWait;

import org.testng.annotations.AfterClass;

import org.testng.annotations.BeforeClass;

import org.testng.annotations.Test;

public class webdriver_implicit{

                       

            @BeforeClass

            public void beforeClass() {

                        System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "D:\\Softwares\\chromedriver_win32\\chromedriver.exe");   

                        driver = new ChromeDriver();

                        driver.manage().window().maximize();

                        driver.get("http://only-testing-blog.blogspot.in/2013/11/new-test.html");

                       

            }

           

            public WebDriver driver;

            @Test

            public void testIsDiplayed_Enabled() throws Exception {

                       

                        driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(15, TimeUnit.SECONDS);

                        driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[@name='fname']")).sendKeys("My Name");

                        driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[@name='namexyz']"));

           

            }

            @AfterClass

            public void afterClass() throws Exception {

                        driver.quit();

            }

}

In Above webdriver test case with example, 1st Element 'xpath("//input[@name='fname']")' will be found on page but element xpath("//input[@name='namexyz']") is not there on page. So in this case webdriver will wait for 15 Seconds to locate that element on page because we have written implicit wait statement in our code. At last webdriver test will fail because xpath("//input[@name='namexyz']") is not on the page.