CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonseleniumrobotframework
shicky
shicky

Reputation: 2126

Good ways to slow down a test run using Robot Framework?

so I'm reasonably new to Robot Framework and have run into various forms of this issue a number of times now. Essentially I create a suite of tests which eventually pass and check for the things I expect, they then go through a CI/CD pipeline and on the dedicated test runners I hit some failures. In essence this seems to be because the test runners do things a little faster, whether due to hardware or selenium speed, it doesn't really matter.

To avoid these failures I end up adding to the tests to 'slow' them down at certain points to ensure success, basically bloating them or just being a little more protective. So for those with more experience, how do you handle this situation? I'd like to stick with best practice as far as I can, i.e. I'm not just using sleeps everywhere but using implicit waits, still I don't know what the best approaches are.

Here's snippet of an issue I've hit recently:

Wait Until Page Contains Element ${STATIC_TABLE_XPATH}/somepath 10
${image_text} = Selenium2Library.Get Element Attribute ${STATIC_TABLE_XPATH}/somepath
${second_paragraph_text} = Selenium2Library.Get Text ${STATIC_TABLE_XPATH}/somepath

So basically despite these being functionally correct, they pull back nothing sometimes when run on the test runners. I figure this is because things are happening too quickly, so I added a Wait Until Page Contains Element, unfortunately the same problem still exists. Is there a best way to handle this situation so it consistently passes?

I thought adding a wait until keyword succeeds on the expected variable value would be pretty horrible but happy to be proved wrong!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 6125

Answers (3)

Pekka
Pekka

Reputation: 2280

Even though you feel it's horrible, I think the best way to slow Selenium down is to keep polling element attribute until you get a proper variable. There is no harm in trying to something until it succeeds. If you have a bug, attribute value will never be ok. I believe Wait Until Keyword Succeeds keyword was made just for cases like this. I use it all the time.

Upvotes: 1

JeffC
JeffC

Reputation: 25714

drkthng's reasoning is correct but you don't need to write all that code... it already exists in ExpectedConditions. A simple example

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 10);
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.presenceOfElementLocated(locator));

Take a look at the docs for all the available methods (there are a bunch) and how to use them.

Upvotes: 2

drkthng
drkthng

Reputation: 6939

Avoid Sleep as much as you can.

Implicit waits are also not a solution that scales. They can hold you back big time if you are checking the "non-existence" of elements for example.

I would suggest you make good use of WebDriverWaits.

I often have to wait for certain elements or pages to display, so I wrote some methods like this:

public void waitUntilDisplayed(By elementLocator, int timeoutInSeconds) {
    WebDriverWait wait = (WebDriverWait)new WebDriverWait(driver, timeoutInSeconds).ignoring(StaleElementReferenceException.class);
    wait.until(new ExpectedCondition<Boolean>() {
        public Boolean apply(WebDriver driver) {

            return elementIsDisplayed(elementLocator);
        }
    });
}

public boolean elementIsDisplayed(By elementLocator) {
    if(elementExists(elementLocator)) {
        WebElement element = driver.findElement(elementLocator);
        return element.isDisplayed();
    }
    return false;
}

public boolean elementExists(By elementLocator) {
    List<WebElement> elements = driver.findElements(elementLocator);
    if (elements.size() < 1) {
        return false;
    }

    return true;
}

Upvotes: 0

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