What is the method to pause execution until a specific condition is met in Playwright?

Answer

Using Explicit Waits in Playwright

In Playwright, you can pause your test execution until a certain condition is met using the waitFor method. This method waits for a specific element, identified by a locator, to satisfy a state option.

Here's how you can use it. First, identify the locator of the element you want to wait for. You can use tools like Playwright Inspector or VS Code Extension to generate locators.

Once you have your locator, call the waitFor method on it and pass in a state option. This state option defines the condition that the element should meet before your test continues.

Here's an example. Let's say you want to wait until a text "welcome" is visible on the page. You can do this:

await expect(page.waitForSelector('text=welcome')).toBeVisible();

This code will pause your test until the "welcome" text is visible or until a timeout occurs. The default timeout is 30 seconds. If the text doesn't become visible within this time, a TimeoutError will be thrown.

You can also customize the wait behavior by passing in additional options like timeout and polling. The timeout option defines how long to wait before timing out (in milliseconds), and polling defines how often to check if your condition has been met (in milliseconds).

Using explicit waits with Playwright's waitFor method makes your tests more reliable and less prone to flakiness due to timing issues. For more tips on handling flaky tests, check out this blog post.