Problems running Firefox 5 from watir-webdriver on Mac OS 10.5

Finally decided it was time to update my watir-webdriver development environment to the latest version of Firefox. I have been happily using Firefox 3.6.19 on my 64bit Intel Mac 10.5 and yesterday made the jump to Firefox 5.

To my horror there is a bug in Firefox 4 and 5 which causes problems when attempting to start Firefox from the command line (basically what watir-webdriver does).

Thankfully with the help of Jarib Bakken I was able to use the workaround detailed on this blog post.

The work around is to strip the x86_64 part from firefox-bin using ditto:

cd /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS
mv firefox-bin firefox-bin.original
ditto --arch i386 firefox-bin.original firefox-bin

This will solve the problem until we can upgrade to a later version of Mac Os.

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

WATIR makes a tester's life easier.

I am constantly amazed that Watir and Ruby make software testing a web application so easy.
For example finding all the links in a table based on their text starting with a string.

stub = "0 Text"
browser.table(:id,"myTable").links(:text,/#{stub}/).each { |link| puts link.text }

This will return all the links in the table "myTable" with text starting with "0 Text"

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Setting browser size and position with watir-webdriver

In working on my automated web app test using watir-webdriver I need to change the window size and move it on the screen.

From asking the question at StackOverFlow.com you can do this with the following commands;

browser = Watir::Browser.new(:firefox)
browser.execute_script('window.resizeTo(800,600)')
browser.execute_script('window.moveTo(0,0)')

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Converting scripts from Watir to Webdriver, Table size

I am starting the process of converting my WATIR scripts to use WATIR webdriver.

There a couple of table methods I was using in my WATIR scripts to check the size (rows and columns) of a HTML table.

myTable.row_count
myTable.column_count

These methods don't exist in webdriver so I was looking for a good way of doing the same check.

For rows this seems to give the same result as the row_count method

myTable.rows.length

For column count of the table I've tried converting the table to an array of strings and getting the length of the first row, but the conversion to the string array is taking a while.

myCols = myTable.strings[0].length

After asking the question on StackOverFlow the solution to find the number of columns in the table was to use;

myCols = myTable.row.cells.length

This assumes that the first row has the correct number of columns, which in our application should always be the case.

To avoid rewriting all the unit tests I've extended the Watir::Table class at the start of the script so that it contains the missing row_count and column_count methods.

class Watir::Table
    def row_count
        return self.rows.length
    end
    def column_count
        return self.row.cells.length
    end
end

The unit tests now run unaltered.

If your table has a uniform number of columns for each row then you could check the whole table by doing something like.

        myTable.rows.each { |myRow|
            myCols = myRow.cells.length
            assert_equal(validColumnCount,myCols,"Column count mismatch")
        }

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Web-Testing

#Web-Testing

Problems running Firefox 5 from watir-webdriver on Mac OS 10.5

WATIR makes a tester's life easier.

Setting browser size and position with watir-webdriver

Converting scripts from Watir to Webdriver, Table size