How can I get Selenium Web Driver to wait for an element to be accessible, not just present?

Question

I am writing tests for a web application. Some commands pull up dialog boxes that have controls that are visible, but not available for a few moments. (They are greyed out,

Answer 1

There are already some great answers posted up here, but I thought I would add my solution. Explicit wait etc. are great functions for use in testing with selenium. However explicit wait merely performs the function of a Thread.Sleep() that you can only set one time. The function below is what I used to "Shave off" a few minutes. It waits until the element is "accessible."

    //ALTERNATIVE FOR THREAD.SLEEP
public static class Wait
{  
    //public static void wait(this IWebDriver driver, List IWebElementLIst)
    public static void wait(this IWebDriver driver, By bylocator)
    {
        bool elementPresent = IsPresent.isPresent(driver, bylocator);
        while (elementPresent != true)
        {
            Thread.Sleep(1000);

            elementPresent = IsPresent.isPresent(driver, bylocator); 

        }

    }

}

It is in C#, but to adapt it would not be that difficult. Hope this helps.