Ruby selenium script waiting for an element to disappear

Question

I'm a Java developer, I'm new to Ruby and I'm worried that I'm forcing or not-so-well using the goodness of the Ruby syntax.

• What do you think about the Exception catching and how to print it in error messages?
• What about the code block (closure?) I'm passing to the "until" method?
• Is it ok to implicitly rely on what the last executed sentence of the block will be, regarding what would be its returned value?

def waitUntilDisappears(type, name) #Waits for a particular element to disappear
 begin
 puts "Waiting for element #{name} to disappear..."
 wait = Selenium::WebDriver::Wait.new(:timeout => 5)
 wait.until do
 element = driver.find_element(type, name)
 if element != nil
 displayValue = element.css_value("display")
 puts "Element #{name} has displayValue #{displayValue}."
 displayValue != "block"
 end
 end
 puts "Element #{name} disappeared or not present. OK."
 rescue Exception => e
 puts "Error: Could not wait for element #{name} to disappearDetails: #{e.inspect}"
 end
end

• jotadepicas: Thanks for the edit, I added "Ruby" to the title because Selenium here is used via Ruby (it could be other languages like Java, etc, but this case is the use of Ruby i'm interested in reviewing).

Answer 1

Some notes:

• waitUntilDisappears. In Ruby, always: wait_until_disappears.
• if element != nil -> if element.
• if element != nil. I think find_element never returns nil, it raises exception if not found, so this is not needed.
• rescue Exception => e. A rescue that covers a whole method can omit the begin.
• rescue Exception => e. Rescuing from Exception is bad practice. Rescue from StandardError, which is the same as rescue => e.
• puts "Error". It's bad practice to catch an exception (even worse ifit's all exceptions), just print to the screen and return as if nothing happened. Raise an exception or return a value that signals the error.
• Is Element#visible? not enough?

I'd write:

def wait_until_disappears(type, name, timeout: 5)
 wait = Selenium::WebDriver::Wait.new(timeout: timeout)
 wait.until { !driver.find_element(type, name).visible? }
end

• jotadepicas: Hey, thanks! Regarding Element#visible it works different on different browsers, I've seen that most people check manually for the "display" attribute. About the "catch & log" of the exceptions, I'm currently refactoring this testing library, It would probably become a "catch, log and throw", so I can add some context information to the error. Thanks again!
• paul: How to make it work for iOS Mobile Devices Automation? I am using Appium.