Maybe I’m missing something, but couldn’t you just go through ul li a
elements while they gave you something from getText(), and store them to some array, or do something with them directly in that loop?
var i = 0;
var el = element.all(by.css('ul li a'));
var tableItems = [];
(function loop() {
el.get(i).getText().then(function(text){
if(text){
tableItems.push(el.get(i));
i+=1;
loop();
}
});
}());