WebdriverWait is not Ignoring NoSuchElement Exception

[Matthew Vass]

I've been racking my brain over why this isn't working.  No matter what I do this will not work, so I'm hoping someone in the community can help me solve this issue.

The problem comes with a custom function I've written for waiting if an element is visible or not.  I have several other function that do other explicit waits that all seem to have the same issue.  I recently updated my code to turn off implicit waits while executing explicit waits to get a correct wait time.  This is when I noticed my code was not working at all. Below is my code snippet, I have an ajax modal that when it's triggered i need to wait for specific items to be there and that modal gets re-used which is why i need explicit instead of implicit waits for certain scenarios. The code below throws a NoSuchElement exception instead of ignoring and waiting for it.  Any ideas??

     public boolean elementVisible(By by, long seconds) {

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(this.driver, seconds);

return wait

.ignoring(StaleElementReferenceException.class)

.ignoring(NoSuchElementException.class)

.pollingEvery(300, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS)

.until(ExpectedConditions

.visibilityOfElementLocated(by)) != null;

}

[Matthew Vass]

So I found that prior to calling this in my code something else was accessing the elements findBy causing the no such element prior to the wait actually happening.