Is it possible to wait until animation is finished before interacting with element?

Support
1

Hi,

animation in app I work with is quite slow, so when the tests running, they fail often with exceptions. Adding sleep(500) before steps does help, but I believe it is not the best solution. Is it possible to wait until animation is finished?

Thanks.

2

Identify what will appear once animation ends and look for it. For example if after an animation text “Hello, I’m back” appears then run:

wait { text("Hello, I'm back") }

If the animation are so slow that it may hit the timeout defined, then use some while

while texts("Hello, I'm back).size == 0 do
    sleep 0.5
end

In this last one its better to also have one counter incrementing and if it reaches a number you define just raise an exception to fail the test or it may run forever. Examples in ruby, just adapt to your favorite language.

3

Thanks! That’s what I wanted to do. But I think it would be simpler and more logical to wait for finishing the animation instead of presence/disappearance of elements. For example, Calabash has wait_for_none_animating.
So I wonder if you can do something similar with the Appium.

4

@retadmfloyd,

When animating, perhaps we can check the coordinates of an element that is moving, wait for a little, then check the coordinates again. If the coordinates before and after has a delta, then we know the element is still animating, else, animation is done.

5

I use @alangithubtrader’s method for waiting for some animations to complete. I actually use a WebDriverWait for these sorts of animations.

If this is an Android device, you can disable a large set of animations through the developer options under the device’s settings menu. However, even with these disabled, there might be some animations that still persist, but it’s a good step forward towards stability.

1 Like
6

Thanks for your idea.

It helped me to automate iOS AUT page spinner