Being able to test an element exists without relying on exceptions

[vincent-fuchs]

Hi,

Regularly in my application, I need to click on one element if it exists, or another if it doesn't. The problem I have is that there's no method returning a boolean doing that. So I'm writing code like this which throws a quite generic AssertionError (for which I don't know if it failed because it doesn't exist or because element was not clickable), forcing me to write code like this :

private WorkFlowPage clickWorkFlowTab() {

    try{
        find(By.id("someElement")).click();
    }catch(AssertionError e)
    {
        find(By.id("someOtherElement")).click();
    }
    return this;
}

Since it returns a LazyDomElement, find method doesn't perform the search immediately, as mentioned in documentation. Is there a way to force the find to happen, so that I can test if DomElement is null or not, then proceed. Something similar to findEagerly below :

private WorkFlowPage clickWorkFlowTab() {

    DomElement workflowTab=findEagerly(By.id("someElement"));

    if(workflowTab!=null){
        workflowTab.click();
    }
    else {
        find(By.id("someOtherElement")).click();
    }

    return this;
}

One alternative could be to throw a specific exception if the element is not found, to identify clearly these cases, and leave the AssertionError for real assertion issues based on should().