Question

It’s entirely possible that I’m missing something fundamental, but this is a new realm for me and I could use some pointers. I’m getting started using Ruby and Watir to drive/test a web application that’s all AJAX-built. Many of the items don’t have explicit classes/ids, and the dev team of course uses jQuery to get to them. I’m looking for a way to translate their jQuery into Watir to use/modify/check values of the same objects.

For example, they use this to see if there are values in a data grid’s fifth column:

$("div.dataTable table tbody tr").has("td:eq(4):not(:empty)").length > 0

How would I go about doing something similar?

Answer 1

You could make the same check in Watir using:

#Get the rows of the table (assuming there is just one dataTable)
table_trs = browser.div(:class, 'dataTable').table.tbody.trs

#Find how many rows have data in the 5th cell
#  Note that both jQuery and Watir are 0-based index (ie 4 means 5th cell)
rows_with_data = table_trs.count{ |tr| tr.td(:index, 4).text != '' }

#Do your comparison
rows_with_data > 0

You can write it all as one line, but I broke it up here for readability.