waitForCondition revisited

In March 2010, I wrote a piece on using waitForCondition with Selenium 1.0, Selenium RC [Java] waitForCondition example.

At the bottom of the article is a line of code that will let you wait for an ajax call to complete. This line of code was written when I was working on a project using scriptaculous.js.

Recently I joined a company using jQuery.js. The code for waiting is the same but the variable you wait for has changed. If you use the code from March 2010, it would fail because the variable does not exist.

Instead you want to use the last line below:

WebDriver browser = new FirefoxDriver();
    Selenium selenium = new WebDriverBackedSelenium(browser, baseURL);
    browser.get(baseURL);

    selenium.waitForCondition("selenium.browserbot.getCurrentWindow().jQuery.isReady == true", "30000");

You might wonder how I figured this out. The easiest way is to ask the developer. If that is not an option, Firebug on Firefox or the Inspect feature of Chrome will help you out. On Chrome I would right click on the web page and select Inspect Element. The Developer Tools will appear. Select the Scripts section. On the right will be Scope Variables with a pause button at the top of the frame. Clicking the pause button will display the Scope Variables. You then want to look at the variables and see if something jumps out at you.

The other approach is look at the select menu at the top of the left frame. This will list the different javascript files. When I looked at this list I saw the jquery.js script. I could then look up the APIs for jquery.js and figure things out.