Selenium's execution time increases if a web element is absent on a web page

Question

I have a table on my web page I am trying to automation that contains x number of rows (tr)s and under each (tr), there are a varying number of (td)s. In my flow, I have to check for the existence of a particular value (text) inside of a (td) for which I am doing the following:

1. I obtain the total number of rows in the table and iterate through them.

2. For/under each row, I am trying to find out the number of (td) that are present using

   List totalTDs = driver.findElements(By.xpath("...xpath of the td"));

3. Then I do the following to decide whether to perform additional steps in this iteration:

   if (totalTDs.size()> 0) { //validate for the existence of text under the first (td) }

4. Issue I am facing: Certain rows in my table do not have (td) under them and when selenium encounters one such row, it takes a lot of time to determine that the (td) is actually not present before the next line gets executed. When I try to print the number of (td) in one such row at this instant, I get a 0, which proves selenium in fact discovered the absence of (td) for that particular row.

My only concern is that the table I am dealing with has more than 100 rows and vast majority of them does not necessarily contain a (td). If selenium takes a lot of time to find out the (td) is actually not present, that drastically increases the execution time of my script. I am seeking help in understanding how I could get selenium to execute the code faster, if at all possible.

Any help in this regard would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You have two alternatives:

1 - Decrease the timeout in this particular object:

driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(100, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);
... do all your work
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(1, TimeUnit.SECOND);

2 - Search directly for the links (a tag):

List links = driver.findElements(By.xpath(locator_for_td + " a"));

Both alternatives assume that the table is well loaded. A check for this condition may be necessary:

new WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
 ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(
 locator_for_td + " a"));

• Em Revs: Sorry, I just realized my earlier question had some things that we included in a <> truncated. I have since updated my question by including brackets. I can try the first option today you suggested and let you know. Thanks, very much.
• Jitendra Jogeshwar: I would agree with answer above and you directly check for text in td. So you can build an xpath like //table/tr/td[contains(.,'text you are looking for')]
• Em Revs: Joao Farias, you solution/suggestion worked for me. Thanks very much.
• João Farias: You are welcome. Could you mark the answer as accepted?