Selenium wait for Ajax content to load - universal

Question

Is there a universal approach for Selenium to wait till all ajax content has loaded? (not tied to a specific website - so it works for every ajax website)

Answer 1

You need to wait for Javascript and jQuery to finish loading. Execute Javascript to check if jQuery.active is 0 and document.readyState is complete, which means the JS and jQuery load is complete.

public boolean waitForJSandJQueryToLoad() {

    WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 30);

    // wait for jQuery to load
    ExpectedCondition<Boolean> jQueryLoad = new ExpectedCondition<Boolean>() {
      @Override
      public Boolean apply(WebDriver driver) {
        try {
          return ((Long)((JavascriptExecutor)getDriver()).executeScript("return jQuery.active") == 0);
        }
        catch (Exception e) {
          // no jQuery present
          return true;
        }
      }
    };

    // wait for Javascript to load
    ExpectedCondition<Boolean> jsLoad = new ExpectedCondition<Boolean>() {
      @Override
      public Boolean apply(WebDriver driver) {
        return ((JavascriptExecutor)getDriver()).executeScript("return document.readyState")
        .toString().equals("complete");
      }
    };

  return wait.until(jQueryLoad) && wait.until(jsLoad);
}

Answer 2

As Mark Collin described in his book "Mastering Selenium Webdriver", use JavascriptExecutor let you figure out whether a website using jQuery has finished making AJAX calls

public class AdditionalConditions {

  public static ExpectedCondition<Boolean> jQueryAJAXCallsHaveCompleted() {
    return new ExpectedCondition<Boolean>() {

        @Override
        public Boolean apply(WebDriver driver) {
            return (Boolean) ((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript("return (window.jQuery != null) && (jQuery.active === 0);");
        }
    };
  }
}

Answer 3

I don't believe that there is a universal approach out of the box. I typically make a method that does a .waituntilrowcount(2) or waituntilvisible() that polls an element.