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Smart Wait Strategies

One of the most common causes of "flaky" automation is improper waiting. Scripts often fail because they try to click a button before it has fully loaded.

QWeb solves this with a robust Auto-Retry mechanism.

How it Works

You generally do not need to tell QWeb to "wait" for an element. When you run a keyword like ClickText, QWeb enters a retry loop:

  1. Search: It looks for the text on the screen.
  2. Action: If found, it clicks immediately.
  3. Retry: If not found, it waits a split second and tries again.
  4. Fail: It repeats this until the Timeout is reached (Default: 10 seconds). Only then does it fail.

Configuration

Global Timeout

The default 10-second timeout works for most modern apps. However, if you are testing a slow legacy system or a heavy environment, you can increase this globally at the start of your test.

*** Test Cases ***
Configure Environment
    # Set default wait to 30 seconds for all keywords
    SetConfig      DefaultTimeout    30

    OpenBrowser    https://slow-app.example.com    chrome
    VerifyText     Loaded successfully    # Will now wait up to 30s

Per-Keyword Timeout

Sometimes you expect a specific action to take longer (e.g., generating a report), or you want to fail faster if something isn't there immediately. You can override the timeout for a single line using the timeout argument.

# Wait up to 60 seconds just for this step
VerifyText     Report Generated    timeout=60

# Fail quickly (after 3 seconds) if this is not found
VerifyText     Popup Message       timeout=3

The "Anti-Sleep" Rule

Avoid using Sleep

In traditional automation, you might see code like: 

Sleep          5s
ClickElement   //button
Avoid this in QWeb. Hard-coded sleeps make your test suite slow. If the button loads in 1 second, your test still waits for 5, wasting 4 seconds every time.

Instead, rely on Verify* keywords and adjust the max wait time with timeout argument necessary.

Timeout vs. Delay

QWeb offers two arguments that look similar but behave very differently.

Argument Behavior Recommendation
timeout=10 Waits up to 10s. Proceeds immediately if found. ✅ Preferred
delay=10 Always waits 10s before even looking. ❌ Avoid

When to use delay? Only use delay if you have a UI animation that "bounces" or fades in, and you need to ensure it has settled before interacting.

# Waits 2 seconds for animation to settle, then clicks
ClickText    Submit    delay=2