RPA.Desktop Wait for Element does not wait for element

[CodexEmpirium]

Whenever I run RPA.Desktop.Wait For Element, it fails immediately, even if I give it a very large timeout. This does not seem like waiting behavior.

The only workaround is to use it together with "Wait Until Keyword Succeeds", and let it retry several times. But standalone, Wait For Element does not wait, but ignores the 'timeout' argument.

[mikahanninen]

Thanks for the report. This turned out to be a real bug, but in the deprecated `RPA.Desktop.Windows` (pywinauto-based) library: it calls `refresh_window()` once before entering the retry loop, and `find_element()` only re-scans the UI if no cached elements exist — so every retry during the wait re-checks the exact same stale snapshot instead of the live UI, which is why the keyword effectively fails immediately regardless of the timeout.

`RPA.Desktop.Windows` has been deprecated for a long time in favor of `RPA.Windows`, so rather than patch dead code we're removing it entirely in #1343 (major version bump). `RPA.Windows`'s equivalent waiting keywords don't have this caching issue.

Please migrate to `RPA.Windows` — see https://robocorp.com/docs-robot-framework/libraries/rpa-framework/rpa-windows. Closing once #1343 merges.

[CodexEmpirium]

Thanks for the report. This turned out to be a real bug, but in the deprecated RPA.Desktop.Windows (pywinauto-based) library: it calls refresh_window() once before entering the retry loop, and find_element() only re-scans the UI if no cached elements exist — so every retry during the wait re-checks the exact same stale snapshot instead of the live UI, which is why the keyword effectively fails immediately regardless of the timeout.

RPA.Desktop.Windows has been deprecated for a long time in favor of RPA.Windows, so rather than patch dead code we're removing it entirely in #1343 (major version bump). RPA.Windows's equivalent waiting keywords don't have this caching issue.

Please migrate to RPA.Windows — see https://robocorp.com/docs-robot-framework/libraries/rpa-framework/rpa-windows. Closing once #1343 merges.

Thanks for the reply! I will confirm one more time, because I was sure I was not using the deprecated RPA.Desktop.Windows. It looks like I initially reported this bug as using RPA.Desktop library, which is still active correct? Anyways, I will double check.