Selenium C# WebDriver: Wait until element is present

Using the solution provided by Mike Kwan may have an impact in overall testing performance, since the implicit wait will be used in all FindElement calls.

Many times you'll want the FindElement to fail right away when an element is not present (you're testing for a malformed page, missing elements, etc.). With the implicit wait these operations would wait for the whole timeout to expire before throwing the exception. The default implicit wait is set to 0 seconds.

I've written a little extension method to IWebDriver that adds a timeout (in seconds) parameter to the FindElement() method. It's quite self-explanatory:

public static class WebDriverExtensions
{
    public static IWebElement FindElement(this IWebDriver driver, By by, int timeoutInSeconds)
    {
        if (timeoutInSeconds > 0)
        {
            var wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(timeoutInSeconds));
            return wait.Until(drv => drv.FindElement(by));
        }
        return driver.FindElement(by);
    }
}

I didn't cache the WebDriverWait object as its creation is very cheap, this extension may be used simultaneously for different WebDriver objects, and I only do optimizations when ultimately needed.

Usage is straightforward:

var driver = new FirefoxDriver();
driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://localhost/mypage");
var btn = driver.FindElement(By.CssSelector("#login_button"));
btn.Click();
var employeeLabel = driver.FindElement(By.CssSelector("#VCC_VSL"), 10);
Assert.AreEqual("Employee", employeeLabel.Text);
driver.Close();

Alternatively you can use an implicit wait:

driver.Manage().Timeouts().ImplicitWait = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10);

An implicit wait is to tell WebDriver to poll the DOM for a certain amount of time when trying to find an element or elements if they are not immediately available. The default setting is 0. Once set, the implicit wait is set for the life of the WebDriver object instance.

You can also use

ExpectedConditions.ElementExists

So you will search for an element availability like that

new WebDriverWait(driver, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(timeOut)).Until(ExpectedConditions.ElementExists((By.Id(login))));

Source