isElementPresent and elementFinders

Question

If I define a page object myPage:

return { 
  myButton: element(by.css('#my-button'))
};

And then elsewhere perform an isElementPresent check:

return browser.driver
        .isElementPresent(myPage.myButton);

I get the folowing error:

Error: Failed: Invalid locator

Why?

I suspect if I remove the element invocation, this would work. element returns an elementFinder IIUC. But isElementPresent is clearly not designed to work with elementFinders. Why?

Answer 1

.isElementPresent() supports locators or web elements only, you can call .getWebElement() to get the web element from an element finder object:

return browser.isElementPresent(myPage.myButton.getWebElement());

You can also get the locator back from an element finder:

return browser.isElementPresent(myPage.myButton.locator());

Or, you can use the isPresent() method instead:

return myPage.myButton.isPresent();

Also see:

• In protractor, browser.isElementPresent vs element.isPresent vs element.isElementPresent