Ruby selenium script waiting for an element to disappear

Question

I'm a Java developer, I'm new to Ruby and I'm worried that I'm forcing or not-so-well using the goodness of the Ruby syntax.

• What do you think about the Exception catching and how to print it in error messages?
• What about the code block (closure?) I'm passing to the "until" method?
• Is it ok to implicitly rely on what the last executed sentence of the block will be, regarding what would be its returned value?

def waitUntilDisappears(type, name) #Waits for a particular element to disappear
  begin
    puts "Waiting for element #{name} to disappear..."
    wait = Selenium::WebDriver::Wait.new(:timeout => 5)
    wait.until do
      element = driver.find_element(type, name)
      if element != nil
        displayValue = element.css_value("display")
        puts "Element #{name} has displayValue #{displayValue}."
        displayValue != "block"
      end
    end
    puts "Element #{name} disappeared or not present. OK."
  rescue Exception => e
    puts "Error: Could not wait for element #{name} to disappearDetails: #{e.inspect}"
  end
end

Answer 1

Some notes:

• waitUntilDisappears. In Ruby, always: wait_until_disappears.
• if element != nil -> if element.
• if element != nil. I think find_element never returns nil, it raises exception if not found, so this is not needed.
• rescue Exception => e. A rescue that covers a whole method can omit the begin.
• rescue Exception => e. Rescuing from Exception is bad practice. Rescue from StandardError, which is the same as rescue => e.
• puts "Error". It's bad practice to catch an exception (even worse ifit's all exceptions), just print to the screen and return as if nothing happened. Raise an exception or return a value that signals the error.
• Is Element#visible? not enough?

I'd write:

def wait_until_disappears(type, name, timeout: 5)
  wait = Selenium::WebDriver::Wait.new(timeout: timeout)
  wait.until { !driver.find_element(type, name).visible? }
end