Assert that a WebElement is not present

Question

In tests that I write, if I want to assert a WebElement is present on the page, I can do a simple:

driver.findElement(By.linkText("Test Search"));

This will pass if it exists and it will bomb out if it does not exist. But now I want to assert that a link does not exist. I am unclear how to do this since the code above does not return a boolean.

EDIT This is how I came up with my own fix, I'm wondering if there's a better way out there still.

public static void assertLinkNotPresent (WebDriver driver, String text) throws Exception {
List<WebElement> bob = driver.findElements(By.linkText(text));
  if (bob.isEmpty() == false) {
    throw new Exception (text + " (Link is present)");
  }
}

Answer 1

I think that you can just catch org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchElementException that will be thrown by driver.findElement if there's no such element:

import org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchElementException;

....

public static void assertLinkNotPresent(WebDriver driver, String text) {
    try {
        driver.findElement(By.linkText(text));
        fail("Link with text <" + text + "> is present");
    } catch (NoSuchElementException ex) { 
        /* do nothing, link is not present, assert is passed */ 
    }
}