Introducing the Watir Page Helper gem

I’ve very recently released a watir-page-helper gem that provides some useful helper methods when creating page models when using Watir-WebDriver (I chose not to support Watir as it doesn’t work on Firefox 4, therefore not on non-Windows machines).

This is loosely based upon the great work that Jeff Morgan did in his series of UI testing blog posts, but takes the concept a lot further IMO.

I wanted it to be solid before I released it as a gem, so I wrote unit tests for every method, and wrote yard tagged documentation for each method also. You can see the documentation automatically generated on rdoc.info.

Installation

gem install watir-page-helper

Example

require 'watir-webdriver'
require 'watir-page-helper'

class MyPage
  include WatirPageHelper

  direct_url "http://www.google.com"
  expected_element :text_field, :name => "q"
  expected_title "Google"
  text_field :search_box, :name => "q"
  button :search, :name => "btnG"

  def initialize browser, visit = false
    @browser = browser
    goto if visit

    expected_element if respond_to? :expected_element
    has_expected_title? if respond_to? :has_expected_title?
  end
end

browser = Watir::Browser.new :chrome
page = MyPage.new browser, true
page.search_box = "Watirmelon" #This method is created by WatirPageHelper
page.search #This method is created by WatirPageHelper also
browser.close

The above example is very basic, but shows the concept well. You’re much better off putting the initialize method into a base page class so you don’t need to call the same methods for every page.

What you get

Page Methods

• direct_url: allows you to navigate to a page upon initialization, if visit is set to true
• expected_title: allows you to automatically assert the expected title of the page when it is initialized
• expected_element: allows you to initialize the page by looking for a certain element. This is useful for pages that load dynamic content.

Element Methods

Element methods for a majority of the Watir-WebDriver supported elements which generate useful helper methods.
For example: text_field, select_list, radio_button, form, div, span, h1..h6 etc.

Summary

I’ve been using a watir page helper on a few different projects now and I’m sick of copy-and-pasting the code each time, so I thought it’d be nice to package it as a gem.

I also think it’s important to have unit tests for this kind of stuff, so it was a good opportunity to write unit tests for every method in these classes. The documentation was an added bonus too.

I hope you find this useful, please let me know if anything doesn’t make any sense.

Links/Further Info

• The source code on github
• The gem on rubygems.org.
• The rdoc documentation for each method on rdoc.info.