[🐛 Bug]: Async methods cannot be easily recognized

[nvborisenko]

What happened?

We cannot easily understand whether a method is asynchronous or not. When we write code, we use synchronous methods and asynchronous beside. There is high chance to make a mistake when dealing with async methods, and don't await them.

Example:

driver.Network.StartMonitoring();

Who knows it's async or not. Tooling (like IDE) doesn't help us (at least for me) to understand, there is even no warnings.

Even Jim made a mistake:

I also went through open issues in this repository and observed that people don't await StartMonitoring() method.

Solution

Add Async to all async methods according naming convention.

By convention, methods that return commonly awaitable types (for example, Task, Task, ValueTask, ValueTask) should have names that end with "Async".

How can we reproduce the issue?

driver.Network.StartMonitoring();

Relevant log output

no output

Operating System

any

Selenium version

any dotnet, selenium 4.0+

What are the browser(s) and version(s) where you see this issue?

any

What are the browser driver(s) and version(s) where you see this issue?

any

Are you using Selenium Grid?

No response

[github-actions]

@nvborisenko, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

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Thank you!

[rohitkumarWUSTL]

I'm looking to be a first-time contributor; would this be a good issue for me to pick up?

[titusfortner]

Well, this is going to be a huge one and likely won't be released until Selenium 5, and we don't even know what that is going to look like, yet. But @nvborisenko can probably help you find something if you want to work in .NET code.

[titusfortner]

It's easier to chat about it on Slack — https://www.selenium.dev/support/#ChatRoom

[rohitkumarWUSTL]

Ah, those would be good reasons for me to not pick this up as a first issue in that case 😅

I also missed that this issue was re: .NET - I'm primarily looking to contribute in Java, if possible - but regardless I'll join the Slack and catch up. Thank you!

[MgSam]

I'm interested in seeing what the async methods being added to Selenium will look like. Is there a specific branch to check out?

[nvborisenko]

When we think about async methods naming, can I raise here one more issue about "async properties"? It could be separate issue for discussion... anyway: example: #13629

Summary: properties should represent a state, calculated properties should not be "sync-over-async".

CC: @jimevans

[titusfortner]

I seem to recall @jimevans saying something about how he wouldn't rely on properties in an async library. Jim, did I get that right, or did I misunderstand what you were saying?

[Piedone]

Is this issue also about introducing more asynchronous methods where Selenium currently only has sync APIs?