The ExpectedConditions class

The Selenium WebDriver's ExpectedConditions class provides users with common methods to check for specific conditions of elements on a page. Those conditions include such things as:

• Titles
• URLs
• Presence of elements
• Visibility of elements
• Text on elements
• Frames to switch to
• Invisibility of elements
• Element-clickable states
• Staleness of elements
• Refreshing elements
• Element selection states
• Alerts
• Number of windows
• Finding elements
• Attributes of elements
• Number of elements
• Nested elements
• JavaScript values

Using the ExpectedConditions class's methods is simple. You would just call them as follows:

ExpectedConditions.visibilityOf(WebElement element)

Alternatively, you can use:

ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By by)

These two methods do the same thing, except one takes a static locator as a parameter, and the second one takes a dynamically generated locator. But using these methods alone is not enough. It is imperative to wait "up to" a designated time period before throwing an exception that the element is not found. This can be done by passing the result of these methods to the WebDriverWait class's methods.