Question

I am using watir-webdriver (0.5.3) in a Cucumber (1.1.9) test. I am attempting to verify the text value of an <acronym> tag. The code is legacy, and there are plans to change it to a <div> or <span> tag, but in the mean time I have to deal with it. I first attempted:

@browser.acronym(:id => /expense_code(.*)/).text

I received the following error:

NoMethodError: undefined method `acronym' for #<Watir::Browser:0x33e9940>

I poked around in the Watir code to see how tag objects were being created, and found that they seem to be dynamically created based on the HTML5 spec, but then I also found a comment in element.rb stating that they are no longer being created from the spec. At any rate, I couldn’t see an easy way to inherit a <span> object and call it an <acronym> object. So, I looked into alternatives, and found the element object.

@browser.element(:id => /expense_code(.*)/).text

This code works, but it takes about a minute to traverse my page. I’m stuck with the regex for now, as the tag id is actually dynamically generated and I don’t currently have a way to figure out those values. This is what the tag actually looks like:

<acronym class="editable select fillwith:exp_codes default:E100"
title="Expense Code: Expenses" id="expense_code114_582_10777">
E100    </acronym>

I would appreciate any thoughts on how I can improve the performance of my test.

Answer 1

I’m not sure what the proper etiquette is here, but this is the answer I came up with using Chuck’s reply and feedback from jarib in the #watir IRC chat. With all my examples, expense_code = 'E100'.

@browser.element(:tag_name => "acronym", 
                    :class => "default:#{expense_code}").text

The above code works at a very reasonable speed and doesn’t require an xpath. It is a shortening of the following code:

@browser.element(:tag_name => "acronym", 
     :class => "editable select fillwith:exp_codes default:#{expense_code}").text

I learned that I didn’t need to pass the whole string. Anything in a class delimited by a space is dealt with gracefully by watir. I adapted that code from this xpath:

@browser.element(:xpath => "//acronym[contains(@class,
    \'editable select fillwith:exp_codes default:#{expense_code}\')]").text

The gotcha in that code above was needing to escape out the ' around the class values so that it would evaluate correctly.

Just searching for the class (code below) did not work. I have no idea why. I did notice that it pounded the database with requests. Whatever it was doing, the page didn’t like it. Though the reason it was trying multiple times is I slipped a wait_until_present in there.

@browser.element(:class, "editable select fillwith:exp_codes
    default:#{expense_code}").text

Thanks for the help. 🙂