A lot of times while performing Selenium test automation, you’ll come across certain scenarios when your test fails because the webpage or the web element takes some time to load completely. In such scenarios, the best approach is to wait for the page or the web elements to load completely to avoid any errors due to timeout. These errors can be easily resolved if you know how to handle timeouts in Protractor with Selenium, as they help to set an interval of time before the next action is carried out.

To make it even simpler let’s say you visit Amazon’s website, you find a special deals button, you click on it and it brings out a popup with the offer, which further takes you to the deals page. These different elements like the button and pop-up take some time to load and become interactive. But when we run our test scripts without any instruction to wait, it’ll end up throwing an error. To deal with this, we need to handle timeouts in Protractor with Selenium so that we give ample amount of time for the particular element to load.

So, to help you tackle this problem, I’ll show you how to handle timeouts in this Protractor tutorial. If you’re new to Protractor you can visit this Protractor tutorial on running your first test script for Protractor testing.

Timeout While Waiting For The Page To Load

While performing Selenium test automation to navigate a page on the browser, you’ll instruct the Selenium WebDriver to load the web page using the browser.get() command. Under the hood, the Protractor framework waits for the page to load completely.

So let’s take a test case to handle timeouts in Selenium Protractor, where we set the timeout as 5000 ms or 5 secs, the browser will wait for the page to load until 5 sec and returns an error if the page takes more time to load.

For this, you’ll have to add getPageTimeout (timeout in milliseconds) to your protractor configuration file, to reflect the change in timeout globally. But in case you want to provide the timeout for individual test cases, you’ll have to pass an additional parameter when calling the browser.get() i.e. browser.get ( address, the timeout in milliseconds ).

#tutorial #performance #automation testing #selenium webdriver #selenium automation #javascript framework #protractor #javascript developers