Ruby and Watir - testing for page load - ruby

Question

I wrote this script a couple months ago and it has been working great. However, had an issue last night that the page never loads and just spins forever. My script was just timing out. I need to add code to test if the page fully loads within 30 second and if not to exit with a status of 2 and a proper message. Here is the code I have:
#-------------------------------------------------------------#
# Watir Login to XXXX SSO Site
# Written 2017-09-17 for ITC by Jim Clark
#-------------------------------------------------------------#
# the Watir controller
require "watir"
# set a variable
#test_site = "https://oracle.pomeroy.com"
test_site = "http://xxx.xxx"
# open a browser
browser = Watir::Browser.new :phantomjs
#puts "Beginning of test: XXXX SSO Login."
#puts " Step 1: go to the test site: " + test_site
browser.goto test_site
# Test if page fully loaded after 30 seconds, if not, exit with proper status and message
# validate login site loads
if browser.text.include? "Username"
#puts " Step 2: enter username and password text fields."
browser.text_field(:name, "username").set "xxxx"
browser.text_field(:name, "password").set "xxxx"
#puts " Step 3: click login"
browser.button(:text, "Login").click
if browser.text.include? "Logged In As XXXX"
puts "OK: Test Passed. Login worked!"
status = 0
else
puts "CRITICAL: Open a SEV1 - Test login failed!"
status = 2
end
else
puts "CRITICAL: Open a SEV1 - Could not find login page!"
status = 2
end
browser.close
exit status
I have just spent the last 3 hours searching and reading and tried about 20 different things and nothing I did seemed to work.

Answer 1

So while the wait methods have a default timeout, settable thusly: Watir.default_timeout = 30 it appears there is no such setting in Watir itself for the the goto method. However since this is just calling the webdriver navigate.to method, and there IS a timeout settable in webdriver for that, then you can set that using watir's .driver method prior to trying to goto the page. You should be able set that as follows
b.driver.manage.timeouts.page_load = 30
b.goto
In your case since it's the initial load that is failing this ought to work for you, and if you don't like the default error message, you could rescue and provide your own.
In most cases I've seen however, the delays are often with REST services that are slow or overloaded, so just setting that prior to your goto will most often not be sufficient if the delays are with subsequent AJAX calls. What is checked when you use goto is the browser status, which will be 'ready' once the initial page content has been loaded, and often that happens pretty quickly as these days that content is often all static, cached and rapidly served by the webserver. Basically that is the time for loading a web 1.0 web-page.
Typically modern 'web 2.0' pages have a LOT of scripts and AJAX/REST style interactions that are usually necessary for all the page content to appear. It's not uncommon for the browser to report 'ready' when the page is mostly blank as the remaining contents are pulled in via REST or GRAPHQL requests. There is not unfortunately a standard way to tell if the browser is busy making further requests due to scripts.
The most standard thing to do is wait a given amount of time for a specific condition to be true, usually something to appear on the page that is one of the last things loaded/rendered. The wait methods take timeout parameterss, so you could do something along these lines
b.goto 'www.mysite.com'
Watir::Wait.until(timeout=30) { browser.text_field(name: 'username').exists? }
The Watir::Wait.until method (rubydocs here) also accepts a custom message if you want to provide one to make it easier to know what timed out when it fails.