Selenium WebDriver - Test if element is present

Question

is there a way how to test if an element is present? Any findElement method would end in an exception, but that is not what I want, because it can be that an element is not present and that is okay, that is not a fail of the test, so an exception can not be the solution.

I've found this post: Selenium c# Webdriver: Wait Until Element is Present But this is for C# and I am not very good at it. Can anyone translate the code into Java? I am sorry guys, I tried it out in Eclipse but I don't get it right into Java code.

This is the code:

public static class WebDriverExtensions{
    public static IWebElement FindElement(this IWebDriver driver, By by, int timeoutInSeconds){

        if (timeoutInSeconds > 0){
            var wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(timeoutInSeconds));
            return wait.Until(drv => drv.FindElement(by));
        }

        return driver.FindElement(by);
    }
}

Answer 1

You can make the code run faster by shorting the selenium timeout before your try catch statement.

I use the following code to check if an element is present.

protected boolean isElementPresent(By selector) {
    selenium.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(1, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
    logger.debug("Is element present"+selector);
    boolean returnVal = true;
    try{
        selenium.findElement(selector);
    } catch (NoSuchElementException e){
        returnVal = false;
    } finally {
        selenium.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(15, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
    }
    return returnVal;
}

Answer 2

Giving my snippet of code. So, the below method checks if a random web element 'Create New Application' button exists on a page or not. Note that I have used the wait period as 0 seconds.

public boolean isCreateNewApplicationButtonVisible(){
    WebDriverWait zeroWait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 0);
    ExpectedCondition<WebElement> c = ExpectedConditions.presenceOfElementLocated(By.xpath("//input[@value='Create New Application']"));
    try {
        zeroWait.until(c);
        logger.debug("Create New Application button is visible");
        return true;
    } catch (TimeoutException e) {
        logger.debug("Create New Application button is not visible");
        return false;
    }
}