Implicit Waits in Selenium Python

Selenium Python is one of the great tools for testing automation. These days most of the web apps are using AJAX techniques. When a page is loaded by the browser, the elements within that page may load at different time intervals. This makes locating elements difficult: if an element is not yet present in the DOM, a locate function will raise an ElementNotVisibleException exception. Using waits, we can solve this issue. Waiting provides some slack between actions performed – mostly locating an element or any other operation with the element. Selenium Webdriver provides two types of waits – implicit & explicit. This article revolves around Implicit waits in Selenium Python.

Implicit Waits
An implicit wait tells WebDriver to poll the DOM for a certain amount of time when trying to find any element (or elements) not immediately available. The default setting is 0. Once set, the implicit wait is set for the life of the WebDriver object. Let’s consider an example –

# import webdriver
from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Firefox()

# set implicit wait time
driver.implicitly_wait(10) # seconds

# get url
driver.get("http://somedomain / url_that_delays_loading")

# get element after 10 seconds
myDynamicElement = driver.find_element_by_id("myDynamicElement")

This waits up to 10 seconds before throwing a TimeoutException unless it finds the element to return within 10 seconds.

How to create an Implicit wait in Selenium Python ?

Implicit wait as defined would be the set using implicitly_wait method of driver. Let’s implement this on https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ and wait 10 seconds before locating an element.

# import webdriver
from selenium import webdriver

# create webdriver object
driver = webdriver.Firefox()

# set implicit wait time
driver.implicitly_wait(10) # seconds

# get geeksforgeeks.org
driver.get("https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/")

# get element after 10 seconds
element = driver.find_element_by_link_text("Courses")

# click element
element.click()

Output –
First it opens https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ and then finds Courses link

It clicks on courses links and is redirected to https://practice.geeksforgeeks.org/