Table of contents

How to Use Playwright for Navigation and Interaction

Every script that we will write will almost certainly do three key things:

1. Navigating to some web page
2. Waiting for something
3. Possibly getting a timeout 😐

Initial navigation to any page is pretty much the same for both frameworks and can happen in multiple ways.

• Whenever your code does a page.goto(), or a page.click() on a link, you explicitly trigger a navigation.
• The webpage you are on can also trigger a navigation by executing location.href= 'https://example.com' or using the history.pushState() API.

In the example below we trigger two navigations:

1. The initial load of the page.
2. A navigation to the shopping cart by clicking a link

import { test } from '@playwright/test'

test('basic navigation', async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto('https://danube-web.shop/')
  await page.click('#cart')
})

Run in Checkly

Run this example as follows:

npx playwright test basic-browser-navigation.spec.ts

waiting for something to happen is a crucial part of any automation script. In most cases, this is handled automatically by Playwright. For example, when you click a button, Playwright will wait for that button to be clickable before it actually clicks it.

In the example below, we type an email address into an input field on a login modal. Playwright’s fill method comes with built-in waiting functionality.

import { test } from '@playwright/test'

test('basic built-in waiting', async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto('https://danube-web.shop/')
  await page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Log in' }).click()
  await page.getByPlaceholder('Email').click()
  await page.getByPlaceholder('Email').fill('test@test.com')
})

Run this example as follows:

npx playwright test basic-browser-waiting.spec.ts

However, there are cases where you need to wait for something specific to happen. For example, you might want to wait for a specific element to appear on the page. In this case you may want to use the page.waitForSelector() method.

This method waits for an element to appear in the page. This is your bread and butter and should be used whenever something needs to be loaded after clicking, hovering, navigating etc. You can pass it an object with a timeout attribute to override the default 30 seconds.

This works exactly the same for the page.waitForXpath() function is you are using XPath selectors instead of CSS selectors.

The page.waitForNavigation() method — but also similar methods like page.reload() and page.goBack() — all take some options that determine “how” it should wait and what the timeout limits are.

These options come in two flavors:

1. Hard timeout

The time in milliseconds passed as the timeout property e.g. page.waitForNavigation({ timeout: 2000 }). We do not recommend using this if you do not explicitly need to.

2a. DOM event based

These two options are directly related to the events your browser emits when it has reached a certain loading stage.

• load: This is the default and very strict: your whole page including all dependent resources, i.e. images, scripts, css etc.
• domcontentloaded: less strict: when your HTML has loaded.

Note: the load option is the default.

2b. Heuristic based

These two options are based on the heuristic that if (almost) all network connections your browser has are no longer active, your page has probably finished loading.

• networkidle0: consider navigation to be finished when there are no more than 0 network connections for at least 500 ms.
• networkidle2: consider navigation to be finished when there are no more than 2 network connections for at least 500 ms.

Playwright has done away with the distinction between networkidle0 and networkidle2 and just has:

• networkidle: consider navigation to be finished when there are no more than 0 network connections for at least 500 ms.

Both options 2a and 2b are passed using the waitUntil property, e.g. page.waitForNavigation({ waitUntil: 'networkidle2' })

Which of these options is useful to you depends on your situation:

• Does your SPA need to be fully rendered and finish all XHR calls? Go with load
• You server render and load in some non-crucial element in a lazy fashion? go for one of the networkidle variant.

Now that we know how to start a browser and navigate to a URL, the clear next step is to learn how to interact with a webpage.

1. Waits and Timeouts
2. Playwright general navigation docs
3. Playwright auto waiting