# Handling Page Hydration Issues

At some point, while using Scandium for automated testing, you might come across a situation where Scandium performs an action—like clicking a button or entering text—but nothing actually happens. Or you might notice that text entered into an input field suddenly disappears.

One of the most common reasons for this behavior is **poor page hydration** in the application under test.

In modern web applications, when a page loads, the browser is often served a **static** version first (just HTML). After that, the **dynamic, interactive** part is loaded and the page becomes fully functional—this process is known as **hydration**. This is common in *Server-Side Rendered* applications.

Because Scandium interacts with pages extremely fast, it may start executing actions the moment elements appear, even though the page isn't fully "live" yet. For example, a button might look enabled, but the JavaScript event listeners haven’t been attached yet. Scandium clicks the button, but because nothing is listening for the click, nothing happens.

#### How to Spot a Hydration Issue

To check if your application is affected by poor hydration:

1. Open Chrome DevTools.
2. In the **Network** tab, throttle the network speed to **Slow 3G**.
3. Reload the page and interact with the element (e.g., click a button or type into a field) as soon as it appears.

If the button click doesn’t trigger any action or the typed text gets erased, it’s a clear sign that hydration is not complete before interaction.

#### The Right Fix

This issue is common right after a page navigation or a page that has just finished loading.

The proper solution is to ensure that **interactive elements remain disabled until the page is fully hydrated** and ready to handle user (or test) actions. You can add a reasonable [prestep delay](/step-settings.md) to the step that interacts with the element waiting for hydration.

This improves both user experience and test reliability by giving the page enough time to get hydrated.


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://docs.getscandium.com/handling-page-hydration-issues.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.