Selenium: How to wait for options in a select to be populated?

Question

I am using Selenium for the first time and am overwhelmed by the options. I am using the IDE in Firefox.

When my page loads, it subsequently fetches values via an JS

Answer 1

We had similar problem where the options within drop down was fetched from a third party service, which sometimes was a slower operation.

Select select = new Select(driver.findElement(cssSelector("cssSelectorOfSelectBox")));    
waitUnitlSelectOptionsPopulated(select)

here is the definition for waitUnitlSelectOptionsPopulated

private void waitUntilSelectOptionsPopulated(final Select select) {
            new FluentWait(driver)
                    .withTimeout(60, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
                    .pollingEvery(10, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS)
                    .until(new Predicate() {
                        public boolean apply(WebDriver d) {
                            return (select.getOptions().size() > 1);
                        }
                    });
        }

Note: A check of select.getOptions().size() >1 was needed in our case as we had one static option always displayed.