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Protractor - Jasmine . Perform some action only when a specific element is present.

I have a window-box with two buttons 'add' and 'close'. I need to test below scenario:
When clicked on 'add' button it throws error and the window remains open. I need to click on 'close' button to proceed.
I used below code:
if(element(by.xpath("xpath_of_error_box")).isEnabled())
{
element(by.xpath("xpath_of_close_button")).click();
}
But it throws below error:
No element found using locator: By(xpath, xpath_of_error_box)
Is there any way to handle this?

According to the error, it seems that your xpath locator didn't match any element. And according to the additional clarification in the question you could try:
element(by.xpath("xpath_of_error_box")).isDisplayed().then(isDisplayed => {
if (isDisplayed) {
// do what you need when it is visible
} else {
// if not then proceed
}
});
As it was pointed out, isEnabled might not be the proper method you should use in this case. If it seems that the element you try to find is always present in the dom, you might better try to check for its visibility using isDisplay instead.
An advice. It's not a good idea to use xpath locators in your tests, because this ties them to the html DOM structire of the web page you are observing. As we know, the UI happens to change often, which would make your tests to brake often as well. Although this is of cource a personal preference, it is such until you end up with tons of brocken tests after a single small change in the html.

If you need to check if an element is present you can use the following code:
if (element(by.xpath("yourXpath")).isPresent())
But your problem is not on your if code, your problem is that the xpath your are searching doesn't exist.

isEnabled() and isPresent() returns promise (not boolean) and have to be resolved.
isEnabled() could be only used for <button>.
You can use XPath all the time, don't listen to anyone.
PS. Of course it would be glad to see your HTML to check the correctness of your XPath.

How to retrieve the text of an element and write it to a file for later retrieval in protractor using angular js

So, I have to check the status of an action started by the automation script using another automation script. In order to track the action, I have to capture its Id and write it to a file which can be then read by the second script to look for the action. The problem I am having is that I am unable to get the action Id which is a number using getText(). Instead, I keep seeing other non sensical text when I check the content of the file or the variable to which I first store the Id.
The html code for action Id is:
<dd class="ng-binding">232</dd>
I am trying to capture the Id (#232 here) like this:
var Id = element(by.xpath('html/body/div[1]/div[2]/div/div[2]/div/div[2]/div[3]/dl/dd[1]')).getText();
Upon executing the automation script, the console output shows this for the var Id:
Id:[object Object]
I have verified using protractor elementExplorer that xpath points to the right element and can even extract the Id and displays it on the screen correctly. It just does not work when I am trying to store the same Id to a variable and then write to a file so that I can retrieve it for later use. Any help or hints on how to do this would be greatly appreciated.

getText() returns a promise, you have to resolve it, using absolute xpath is a bad way of locating elements. Have you tried locating with cssSelector?
element(by.css('dd.ng-binding')).getText().then(function(text) {
console.log(text);
});

jQuery on external text requesting images

I'm working on a chrome extension that uses jquery to parse the source of a page for specific things. In example I'm looking through Wikipedia to get the categories.
I get the source of the page via
chrome.tabs.executeScript(tabId, {
code: "chrome.extension.sendMessage({action: 'getContentText', source: document.body.innerHTML, location: window.location});"
}, function() {
if (chrome.extension.lastError)
console.log(chrome.extension.lastError.message);
});
I am then listening for this message (successfully) and then use jquery to parse the source key of the object, like so
if (request.action == "getContentText")
{
//console.log(request.source);
$('#mw-normal-catlinks > ul > li > a', request.source).each(function()
{
console.log("category", $(this).html());
});
}
This works as expected and logs a list of all the category links innerHTML. However the issue happens from that jQuery selector that it tries to load the images that are contained in request.source. This results in errors such as
GET chrome-extension://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fc/Padlock-silver.svg/20px-Padlock-silver.svg.png net::ERR_FAILED
These are valid links, however they are being called (unneeded) from my extension with the chrome-extension:// prefix (which is invalid). I'm not sure why jquery would try to evaluate/request images from within source using a selector

I guess this is happening because Wikipedia uses relative paths on their images (instead of https:// or http://, simply // - so the content loaded is relative to the server). The requests are being made by jQuery and you can see here how to fix this issue (in future, please make sure to search SO more thoroughly).

A huge thank you to #timonwimmer for helping me in the chat. We both happened to find different solutions at the same time.
My solution was to use a regex to remove any occurances of the images. Via
var source = request.source.replace(/.*?\.wikimedia\.org\/.*?/g, "");
His was an answer on stack overflow already, that was derived from another answer. If you are interested this answer works perfectly

If you give jQuery a string with a complete element declaration it actually generates a new DOM element, similar to calling document.createElement(tagName) and setting all of the attributes.
For instance: var $newEl = $("<p>test</p>") or in your case img tag elements with $("<img/>"). That would get parsed and created as a new DOM HTML element and wrapped by jQuery so you can query it.
Since you are passing a complete and valid HTML string, it is parsing it into an actual DOM first. This is because jQuery uses the built in underlying document.querySelector methods and they act on the DOM not on strings -- think of the DOM as a database with indexes for id and class and attributes for querying. For instance, MongoDB cannot perform queries on a raw JSON string, it needs to first process the JSON into BSON and index it all and the queries are performed on that.
Your problem is less with jQuery and more so with how elements are created and what happens when attributes change for those elements. For instance, when the img elements are created with document.createElement('img') and then the src attribute is set with imgElement.src = "link to image" this automatically triggers the load for the image at location src.
You can test this out for yourself by running this in your JavaScript Developer Console:
var img = document.createElement('img');
img.src = "broken-link";
Notice that this will likely show and errors in your console after running stating that the image cannot be found.
So what you want, to ensure so it does not resolve the image's src, is to either
1) apply jQuery on an existing DOM (document.body, etc), or
2) let it parse and evaluate the string into a DOM and clean the string before hand (remove the img tags using Regex or something). Take a look at https://stackoverflow.com/a/11230103/2578205 for removing HTML tags from string.
Hope it works out!

Verify an element is not existing using webdriver and selenium

I'm using WebdriverIO and selenium-standalone to write automated tests that will verify that various parts of our user interface are working.
I need to verify that an element is not present on the page. For example, our system allows staff to track various types of resources that we are referring clients to. If a staff member accidentally adds the wrong resource, they can delete it, and I want to verify that the resource was actually deleted and is not present on the page.
WebdriverIO has an .isExisting() property, but no way to check if something is not existing (or not visible/present). I could also use Chai assertions to figure this out, but haven't delved into that world yet.
Here's a snippet of my code:
it('I can delete a resource from a need', function() {
return driver
.moveToObject('span.ccx-tasklist-task') // Hover mouse over resource
.click('div.referral-controls a.btn.dropdown-standalone') // Click Resource drop-down
.click('div.referral-controls.ccx-dropdown-menu-selected li > a') // Delete Resource
.pause(2000);
// Need to Verify that resource was deleted here
Any advice? Let me know if you need more information.

You can waitForExist with the reverse option set to true.
.waitForExist( '[id$=OpenNeedsPanel] div.commodities', 500, true )

I was able to verify that an element didn't exist on the page like this:
.isExisting('[id$=OpenNeedsPanel] div.commodities').should.eventually.equal(false);

you can simply use the below mentioned line of code
int temp=driver.findElements(By.xpath("your x-path expression")).size();
you can even replace your xpath locator with your other locators as well like id,class,link etc.
Now, if the value of temp>0, it means , your element exists

You can refer https://webdriver.io/docs/api/element/waitForExist.html
Wait for an element for the provided amount of milliseconds to be present within the DOM. Returns true if the selector matches at least one element that exists in the DOM, otherwise throws an error. If the reverse flag is true, the command will instead return true if the selector does not match any elements.
resource.waitForExist(1000, true);
where 1000 is the timeout in ms.

using JQuery to fetch an html document and parse it into a DOM tree

So essentially I'm trying to build my own version of GitHub's tree slider. The relevant Javascript/JQuery code is:
// handles clicking a link to move through the tree
$('#slider a').click(function() {
history.pushState({ path: this.path }, '', this.href) // change the URL in the browser using HTML5 history module
$.get(this.href, function(data) {
$('#slider').slideTo(data) // handle the page transition, preventing full page reloads
})
return false
})
// binds hitting the back button in the browser to prevent full page reloads
$(window).bind('popstate', function() {
$('#slider').slideTo(location.pathname)
}
Ok, hopefully that's understandable. Now here's my interpretation of what's going on here, followed by my problem/issue:
The callback function for the GET request when navigating through the tree is the slideTo method, and an HTML string is passed in as an argument to that function. I'm assuming that slideTo is a function defined elsewhere in the script or in a custom library, as I can't find it in the JQuery documentation. So, for my purposes, I'm trying to build my own version of this function. But the argument passed into this function, "data", is just the string of HTML returned from the GET request. However, this isn't just a snippet of HTML that I can append to a div in the document, because if I perform the same GET request (e.g. by typing the url into a web browser) I would expect to see a whole webpage and not just a piece of one.
So, within this callback function that I am defining, I would need to parse the "data" argument into a DOM so that I can extract the relevant nodes and then perform the animated transition. However, this doesn't make sense to me. It generally seems like a Bad Idea. It doesn't make sense that the client would have to parse a whole string of HTML just to access part of the DOM. GitHub claims this method is faster than a full page reload. But if my interpretation is correct, the client still has to parse a full string of HTML whether navigating through the tree by clicking (and running the callback function) or by doing full page loads such as by typing the new URL in the browser. So I'm stuck with either parsing the returned HTML string into a DOM, or ideally only fetching part of an HTML document.
Is there a way to simply load the fetched document into a Javascript or JQuery DOM object so I can easily manipulate it? or even better, is there a way to fetch only an element with an arbitrary id without doing some crazy server-side stuff (which I already tried but ended up being too spaghetti code and difficult to maintain)?
I've also already tried simply parsing the data argument into a JQuery object, but that involved a roundabout solution that only seems to work half the time, using javascript methods to strip the HTML of unwanted things, like doctype declarations and head tags:
var d = document.createElement('html');
d.innerHTML = data;
body = div.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].innerHTML;
var newDOM = $(body);
// finally I have a JQuery DOM context that I can use,
// but for some reason it doesn't always seem to work quite right
How would you approach this problem? When I write this code myself and try to make it work on my own, I feel like no matter what I do, I'm doing something horribly inefficient and hacky.
Is there a way to easily return a JQuery DOM object with a GET request? or better, just return part of a document fetched with a GET request?

Just wrap it; jQuery will parse it.
$(data) // in your callback

Imagine you want to parse a <p> tag in your normal HTML web page. You probably would use something like:
var p = $('<p>');
Right? So you have to use the same approach to parse an entire HTML document and then, navigate through the DOM tree to get the specific elements you want. Therefore, you just need to say:
$.get(this.href, function(data) {
var html = $(data);
// (...) Navigating through the DOM tree
$('#slider').slideTo( HTMLportion );
});
Notice that it also works for XML documents, so if you need to download via AJAX a XML document from the server, parse the inner information and display it on the client-side, the method is exactly the same, ok?
I hope it helps you :)
P.S: Don't ever forget to put semicolons at the end of each JavaScript sentence. Probably, if you don't put them, the engine would work but it is better to be safe and write them always!