Intro
I am happy to announce that the watir-page-helper gem has been end-of-lifed: meaning no further development will happen on it and it will remain as it stands. I am thoroughly supportive of Cheezy’s page-object gem and recommend you move onto this when you have the first opportunity to do so.
Background
When I initially released this gem, Cheezy had yet to release his page-object gem. I borrowed a lot of his concepts and packaged them into a gem specifically for watir-webdriver. A few weeks later, Cheezy released his page-object gem that not only supports watir-webdriver, but also selenium-webdriver. He has iterated faster than I have and his gem has come along way to support additional features such as defining page-routes and default data. I have supplied a couple of tiny pull requests to him and there is nothing now that watir-page-helper can offer that page-object can’t, so I am EOL’ing watir-page-helper.
So how do I change to use page-object instead of watir-page-helper?
I converted an existing suite of tests that use watir-page-helper to run against Etsy to use the page-object gem (link to tests). It was a fairly straightforward task, and here are the fundamental differences:
- Accessing an actual element object is done via an _element suffix: for example, defining a link :home, provides a home_element method. Watir-page-helper provided a home_link method, and I prefer Cheezy’s approach (the home_link method is actually supported by page-object but you should move away from it).
- Watir-page-helper supported p,li,ol as methods, but these are defined as paragraph, list_item, and ordered_list in page-object.
Using Cheezy’s Page Factory
One of the neat features of the page-object gem is the page factory. This is a way to conveniently access pages from Cucumber steps and the like.
There are a couple of things you need to do:
In env.rb, you should mix in the PageObject::PageFactory module
require 'page-object/page_factory' World(PageObject::PageFactory)
You then have access to helper methods to visit and set the page you want to use (originally there were just visit_page, and on_page, but I added on and visit – I think they read nicer):
visit_page RegistrationPage on_page HomePage visit HomePage on HomePage
Summary
Good things come to an end and get replaced by even better things. Here’s to your future success using the page-object gem.
