Implicit Wait in WebDriver

Implicit wait in WebDriver has solved the compile error of Element not found. Element not found kind of error mostly comes in to picture due to slow internet connection or some time due to responses time of Website or web-application and due to which expected element on the website/webpage takes more time to appear. This cause failure of test script written for that specific element on webpage.

Implicit wait in webdriver synchronize test. This implicit wait implementation in test ensure first that element is available in DOM(Data Object Model) or not if not then it wait for the element for a specific time to wait for appearance of element on Webpage.

Normally Implicit wait do the polling of DOM and every time when it does not find any element then it wait for that element for certain time and due to this execution of test become a slow process because implicit wait keep script waiting.Due to this people who are very sophisticated in writing selenium webdriver code advise not to use it in script and for good script implicit wait should be avoided.

Ok come to the point WebDriver API has one Interface named as Timeouts and this is used for implicit wait and since this is interface so have one function named as implicitlyWait(), this method takes the argument of time in Second, and this code is written like this

driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS);

Here I have taken 5 second as wait, once script see any findElement() method then it goes for 5 second wait.
But this keeps script waiting for 5 second once it see a findElement() method so WebDriver API has introduced one explicit wait and in this WebDriverwait class play a very important role.
So in next post I would let you know about the Explicit wait and i would suggest to use explicit wait.