How to Use Playwright Wait For Navigation Methods

Playwright wait for navigation methods are crucial for handling actions like form submissions and ensuring the page is fully loaded before continuing. They help prevent errors when dealing with dynamic elements or content that hasn’t yet been updated in the DOM. By waiting for events like page loads or button clicks to finish, these methods ensure smooth and reliable interactions.

What Are Playwright Wait For Navigation Methods?

Playwright wait for navigation methods are built-in functions that pause your script execution until the browser finishes navigating from one page to another or completes significant page updates. These navigations can happen after actions like clicking links, submitting forms, or redirects triggered by JavaScript.

By using these methods, you tell Playwright to wait for the page to fully load or update before moving on to the next step in your test. This is important because many modern websites load content dynamically using AJAX or Fetch API, which means parts of the page may load after the initial navigation event.

Types of Playwright Wait For Navigation Methods

Playwright provides robust methods to handle navigation in web automation, ensuring the scripts wait for the page to load or a specific condition to be met before proceeding.

Each method helps you handle different scenarios where waiting for page updates or navigation is essential to keep your tests stable and reliable.

page.wait_for_event()

As part of the Playwright wait for navigation approach, page.wait_for_event() is useful when you need to wait for an element to become visible or interactable before taking action. An example would be a form submission button becoming active only after all required form input fields have been filled out, or lazy-loading images.

Syntax:

page.wait_for_function()

This method is commonly used to pause execution until a JavaScript expression evaluates to a truthy value. It’s useful when you need to wait for specific JavaScript logic to complete, such as executing a function that triggers dynamic content loading.

Syntax:

page.wait_for_load_state()

This method is part of the Playwright wait for navigation approach and helps ensure execution is in sync with the expected behavior of the web page. You can use it to wait until the required load state has been reached before proceeding. It signals that page resources like images and files may have finished loading before you interact with UI elements.

Syntax:

page.wait_for_url()

This method is a core part of the Playwright wait for navigation strategy, allowing you to wait for the main frame to navigate to a given URL. A common use case is waiting for a load event after clicking a link, ensuring that you’ve successfully navigated to a new page.

Syntax:

How to Use Playwright Wait For Navigation Methods?

Before you start implementing the different Playwright wait for navigation methods, make sure you meet the prerequisites. For this demonstration, we will use the LambdaTest eCommerce Playground to simulate user interactions.

Prerequisites

To test how Playwright wait for navigation methods work, start by setting up Playwright locally on your system.

Follow the steps below to complete the setup:

1. Create a virtual environment

Create a folder for this project. In this case, we can name it waits_in_playwright.

Navigate into the new folder and create a virtual environment (env). Use Python’s built-in venv module for this.

Activate the virtual environment for the project.

2. Install Playwright pytest plugin:

Install the Playwright pytest plugin using the following command. Use pip for Python versions 2.x and pip3 for Python versions 3.x.

Install the required browsers for running tests locally.

You’re done setting up a virtual environment and installing Playwright.

Confirm everything is in order by checking the versions of your dependencies by following the commands below.

• For Python : python3 – –version
• For Playwright: playwright – –version
• For pytest: pytest – –version

Now that all dependencies are in place, you can add a few capabilities to run your script on the LambdaTest platform. It is an AI-native test execution platform that lets you run manual and Playwright automated tests at scale across different environments.

To run your Playwright test on LambdaTest, first get your Username and Access Key by navigating to your profile avatar > Account Settings > and copying them from the Password & Security tab.

Use the LambdaTest Capabilities Generator to create capabilities that specify your preferred browser and its supported operating systems based on your needs.

Now that you have captured all the details from LambdaTest, all you need to do is paste them into your test script.

You must create a file called wait_fixture.py, where you’ll add all the necessary configurations for LambdaTest as shown in the code below.

Below is the code walkthrough that explains the code given in the file wait_fixtures.py in a step-by-step process.

Code Walkthrough:

1. Import all necessary packages, including Playwright’s sync_playwright() function.
2. Use the load_dotenv(“../.env”, override=True) method to read your LambdaTest username (LT_USERNAME) and access key (LT_ACCESS_KEY) stored in your .env file.
3. The playwrightVersion variable holds the Playwright version retrieved via subprocess.
   • lt_cdp_url connects to LambdaTest’s cloud Chrome instance
   • playwright.chromium.connect() uses this URL to create a browser instance on LambdaTest.
4. The @pytest.fixture decorator creates browser and page fixtures. The page fixture uses the browser.new_page(), yields the page for tests, then closes it after execution.
5. The set_test_status() fixture allows you to mark test results as passed or failed by evaluating status and remarks in the page context.

To learn more about Playwright fixtures, follow this video from the LambdaTest YouTube Channel.

Using the Playwright wait_for_event() Method

The method page.wait_for_event() waits for a specific event, such as a page load, to occur before proceeding, making it one of the key Playwright wait for navigation strategies.

Below is a test scenario demonstrating how this method works.

Test Scenario:

Navigate to the homepage of the LambdaTest eCommerce Playground. Click on Shop by Category to reveal product categories. Click on the Cameras category. Use the page.wait_for_event() method to wait until the domcontentloaded is fired.

Code Implementation:

Here is the code implementation for the above test scenario.

Below, you’ll find the code walkthrough for the Playwright wait for navigation method, page.wait_for_event().

Code Walkthrough:

1. Import the page, browser, set_test_status fixtures, and the expect() function.
2. Create a test_wait_event_navigation(page) function that takes a page fixture parameter. Go to the LambdaTest eCommerce website using the page.goto() method.
3. Select and click the Shop by Category button using the page.get_by_role() locator.

Use the codegen command and the Pick Locator tool to easily locate and generate the line of code for the Shop by Category link element.



4. Select and click the Cameras link using the page.get_by_role() locator. As stated in step 3 above, use the Pick Locator tool to locate the Cameras link.

To learn more about locating elements using Playwright, follow this guide on Playwright locators.

5. Use the page.wait_for_event() method to wait for the DOM tree content to be fully loaded.
6. Get the page title using the page.title() method and validate if it matches the expected value. Use set_test_status to set the status to ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ depending on the outcome, along with an appropriate remark.
7. Use the expect() function to assert that the Cameras category page is fully loaded and has the title Cameras.

Code Execution:

To execute the test code above, run the following command:

Using the Playwright wait_for_function() Method

The method page.wait_for_function() waits for a JavaScript function or expression to return a truthy value.

Below is the test scenario demonstrating how this method works.

Test Scenario:

Navigate to the homepage of the LambdaTest eCommerce Playground. Click on Jolio Balia to reveal the author’s blog posts. Use the page.wait_for_function() method to wait for the JavaScript expression to resolve to true.

Code Implementation:

Here is the code implementation for the above test scenario.

Below, you’ll find the code walkthrough for the Playwright wait for navigation method, page.wait_for_function().

Code Walkthrough:

1. Use page.get_by_role() to select and click the Jolio Balia link.
2. Use page.wait_for_function() to wait until the document title matches Jolio Balia.
3. Retrieve the page title and set the test status using set_test_status() based on the result.
4. Assert the title using the expect() function.

Code Execution:

To execute the above test code, run the following command:

Using the Playwright wait_for_load_state() Method

The method page.wait_for_load_state() waits for the web page to reach a specified load state.

Below is a test scenario demonstrating how this method works.

Test Scenario:

Navigate to the homepage of LambdaTest eCommerce Playground. Wait for the website to load completely. Use the page.wait_for_load_state() to wait for the default load state to be reached.

Code Implementation:

Here is the code implementation for the above test scenario.

Below, you’ll find the code walkthrough for the Playwright wait for navigation method, page.wait_for_load_state().

Code Walkthrough:

1. Use page.wait_for_load_state() to wait for the page to fully load.
2. Retrieve and validate the homepage title.
3. Set test status using set_test_status() and validate using the expect() function.

Code Execution:

To execute the above test code, run the following command:

Using the Playwright wait_for_url() Method

The method page.wait_for_url() waits for the web page’s main frame to navigate to a new URL or match a specified URL pattern.

Below is a test scenario demonstrating how this method works.

Test Scenario:

Navigate to the homepage of LambdaTest eCommerce Playground. Select and click the Blog link using the page.get_by_role() method. Wait for the page to navigate to the matching URL pattern. Check that the URL pattern matches the URL of the loaded web page.

Code Implementation:

Here is the code implementation for the above test scenario.

Below, you’ll find the code walkthrough for the Playwright wait for navigation method, page.wait_for_url().

Code Walkthrough:

1. Use page.get_by_role() to click the Blog link.
2. Use page.wait_for_url() to wait for a matching URL pattern.
3. Retrieve and validate the page title.
4. Use set_test_status() to update the test status and assert the final URL using a regex with expect().

Code Execution:

To execute the above test code, run the following command:

To execute all test cases together, you can use the pytest-xdist plugin. First, install the pytest-xdist plugin using the following command in the console:

Let’s execute all tests together by running the following command given below.

Let’s head back to the LambdaTest Dashboard to view the test results.

The above image shows a quick summary of all four tests you executed for each of the Playwright wait for navigation methods.

Conclusion

When you simulate user actions, such as navigation, clicking, and form filling, using an automation script, we need to wait at intervals to allow these actions to be completed before proceeding with other steps.

Implementing waiting in browser automation scripts ensures that web pages are fully loaded, elements are interactable, and tests become more stable and less prone to flakiness. Playwright provides methods that can be used to initiate waiting in automation scripts. These methods can be used to wait for an event, function, load state, or a matching URL.

We encourage using these Playwright wait for navigation methods when writing efficient automation scripts.

Citations

• Playwright Navigation: https://playwright.dev/docs/navigations