How To Create A Condition In Protractor For When An Element Exists Or Not

In automated testing, ensuring your tests run smoothly and efficiently is crucial. One common scenario in testing web applications is checking whether an element exists on a page before performing an action. With Protractor, an end-to-end test framework for Angular and AngularJS applications, you can easily create conditions to handle these situations.

To create a condition in Protractor for when an element exists or not, you can leverage the Expected Conditions class provided by Protractor. This class offers a variety of predefined conditions that you can use in your test scripts to wait for specific events or states to occur.

First, you need to ensure that you have Protractor set up in your project. If you haven't already installed Protractor, you can do so using npm:

npm install -g protractor

Once Protractor is installed, you can set up your Protractor configuration file and write your test scripts. To create a condition for element existence, you can use the `presenceOf` method from Protractor's Expected Conditions class.

Here's an example of how you can create a condition to check if an element with a specific CSS selector exists on a page:

const { browser, element, by, ExpectedConditions } = require('protractor');

// Example test script
it('should check if element exists', async () => {
  await browser.get('https://example.com');

  const elementToCheck = element(by.css('.example-class'));
  
  // Wait for the element to be present on the page
  await browser.wait(ExpectedConditions.presenceOf(elementToCheck), 5000); // 5 seconds timeout

  // Perform actions on the element once it exists
  await elementToCheck.click();
});

In this example, we first navigate to a web page and define the element we want to check using Protractor's element locator. We then use the `presenceOf` method along with the `browser.wait` function to wait for the element to become present on the page within a specified timeout period (in milliseconds).

If the element is found within the specified time, the test will proceed to the next steps, such as clicking on the element or performing any other actions. If the element does not appear within the timeout period, a timeout error will be thrown, and the test will fail.

By using Protractor's Expected Conditions class and the `presenceOf` method, you can create robust and reliable tests that handle scenarios where elements may or may not exist on a page. This approach helps you write more stable automation scripts that accurately reflect the behavior of your web application.