Checking an element's presence

The Selenium WebDriver doesn't implement Selenium RC's isElementPresent() method for checking if an element is present on a page. This method is useful for building a reliable test where you can check an element's presence before performing any action on it.

In this recipe, we will write a method similar to the isElementPresent() method.

How to do it...

For implementing the isElementPresent() method, follow these steps:

  1. Create a method isElementPresent() and keep it accessible to your tests as follows:
    private boolean isElementPresent(By by) {
        try {
            driver.findElement(by);
            return true;
        } catch (NoSuchElementException e) {
            return false;
        }
    }
  2. Implement a test which calls the isElementPresent() method. It will check if the ...

Get Selenium Testing Tools Cookbook now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.