How do I verify that an element does not exist in Selenium 2

Question

In Selenium 2 I want to ensure that an element on the page that the driver has loaded does not exist. I\'m including my naive implementation here.

    WebEle         


        

Answer 1

If you are testing using junit and that is the only thing you are testing you could make the test expect an exception using

@Test (expected=NoSuchElementException.class)
public void someTest() {
    driver.findElement(By.className("commentEdit"));
}

Or you could use the findElements method that returns an list of elements or an empty list if none are found (does not throw NoSuchElementException):

...
List deleteLinks = driver.findElements(By.className("commentEdit"));
assertTrue(deleteLinks.isEmpty());
...

or

....
assertTrue(driver.findElements(By.className("commentEdit")).isEmpty());
....