Using Selenium, most of the time we do integration tests at the minimum. Many of our UI tests are either system-level tests or end-to-end tests. This poses a challenge to our testing. Our system may not always be as stable as we would want it to be. It’s easier with unit tests - just mock out whatever integration you do not require for your test and your set to go.

Things happen at the integration and system level - services may be down, and external servers may be slow, a refresh is needed from time to time. While it is OK from the manual test point of view, it is a big problem from the test automation point of view.

There is no magic answer to solve this issue. We can minimize it as much as possible. Having a retry mechanism helps. In this section, we will demonstrate a Retry mechanism for failed service or a page refresh error.

Let’s start by describing the full test and then we will walk through it step by step:

@Test
@DisplayName("Test to retry operation")
public void retryTest(VerisoftDriver driver){
    driver.get("https://www.wikipedia.org/");
    driver.findElement(By.id("searchInput")).sendKeys("Test Automation");
    new Actions(driver).sendKeys(Keys.ENTER).build().perform();

    Retry retry = new Retry(driver, 3, 1500, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);
    retry.attempt(new Attemptable() {
        @Override
        public void attempt() throws Throwable {
            //replace string with "Test automations" to see the retry in action
            if (driver.getTitle().contains("Test automation"))
                return;
            else
                throw new NotFoundException("Could not find element - retrying");
        }

        @Override
        public void onAttemptFail() {
            driver.navigate().refresh();
        }
    });
}

The mechanism is essentially a class named Retry that receives an anonymous class as a parameter (using an interface).

The purpose of this test is to search for a term and then expect to see the term at the title of the search result page. We will focus on the Retry part:

Retry retry = new Retry(driver, 3, 1500, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);

retry.attempt(new Attemptable() {

@Override
public void attempt() throws Throwable {
    if (driver.getTitle().contains("Test automation"))
        return;
    else
        throw new NotFoundException("Could not find element - retrying");
}

@Override
public void onAttemptFail() {
    driver.navigate().refresh();
}