Can powershell wait until IE is DOM ready?

Question

I\'m currently writing a script and I\'m using

while($IE.busy) {Start-Sleep 1}

to wait for the page to be ready.

Once the page is

Answer 1

I found this thread really helpful and ended up coming up with a slightly different solution. I am pretty new to powershell so hopefully I didn't make a hash of it but this worked really well for me.

I used a "while" statement so that my condition would loop while true:

while($ie.document.body.outerHTML -notMatch "<input type=`"submit`" value=`"Continue`">") {start-sleep -m 100};

In this case I was matching against a portion of the "outerHTML" part of the body. As long as I don't match the specified text the script will wait and continue to loop the match check.

I like this solution as I could do it in more or less one line of code and I like to keep things compact where possible. Hopefully this is helpful to someone else. Like the OP I found ie.readystate to be very finnicky/unreliable but I really didn't want to just put a static sleep timer in.

Also, while Chrome is an excellent way to break a page down. You can also print to the console window once you have IE running programmatically by simply running:

$ie.document.body

You can dig through visually and then filter down to the section you want which should speed up your matching (I would guess), which is what I did in my code example above.

The only other thing I will note... I think -match uses "regex" because I had to use the tick mark (ex. ` ) to escape the quotes that were part of the string I was matching.

Cheers!

Here is a good reference on "while" logic: http://www.powershellpro.com/powershell-tutorial-introduction/logic-using-loops/

Answer 2

Here's how I do this.

Step 1 - Identify a web page element that only appears once the page is fully rendered. I did this using the Chrome developer tools 'Elements' view which shows the DOM view.

Step 2 - Establish a wait loop in the script which polls for the existence of the element or the value of text inside that element.

# Element ID to check for in DOM
$elementID = "systemmessage"

# Text to match in elemend
$elementMatchText = "logged in"

# Timeout
$timeoutMilliseconds = 5000

$ie = New-Object -ComObject "InternetExplorer.Application"

# optional
$ie.Visible = $true

$ie.Navigate2("http://somewebpage")
$timeStart = Get-Date
$exitFlag = $false

do {

    sleep -milliseconds 100

    if ( $ie.ReadyState -eq 4 ) {

        $elementText = (($ie.Document).getElementByID($elementID )).innerText
        $elementMatch = $elementText -match $elementMatchText

        if ( $elementMatch ) { $loadTime = (Get-Date).subtract($timeStart) }

    }

    $timeout = ((Get-Date).subtract($timeStart)).TotalMilliseconds -gt $timeoutMilliseconds
    $exitFlag = $elementMatch -or $timeout

} until ( $exitFlag )

Write-Host "Match element found: $elementMatch"
Write-Host "Timeout: $timeout"
Write-Host "Load Time: $loadTime"