Smart is_displayed

[mfalesni]

Currently, we have is_displayed that only returns true or false without further explanation. It would be helpful to see which exact part of the is_displayed failed. Therefore I would propose this:

• Create a descriptor that will be set as is_displayed instead of the property and will hold a set of rules/checks for the displayed check.
• The descriptor would implement __nonzero__ to act as a boolean value, therefore making it usable in if and such expressions.
• On the __nonzero__ resolution it would store the result of each partial check in some sort of dictionary.
• It would provide a method that would either directly raise an exception or just provide an information about those checks that did not pass.

if not view.is_displayed:
    raise Exception(view.is_displayed.why)

Or something like that, this is just a concept. (the sample provided would have caching problems)

The rules would be flexible - a string could represent either widget name (it would call is_displayed on that one) or if it would not be a widget then it would assume it is an attribute to be read. It could also provide some basic checkers like you could do a value comparison ... the discussion is open.

[psav]

My main issue with is_displayed relates to the selenium implementation we have that pulls elements back all the time. We discussed doing something in JS for this instead for the situations where we have a locator.

[mfalesni]

It would be interesting if we had a way to analyze and join xpath locators, that way we could just throw them together, use a long xpath for a quick check and if it is not displayed do a deeper analysis using separate locators. Remember widgets usually spit xpath. And CSS locators should be translatable to xpath as well :)