Watir - how to access to an input type = text element generated via Javascript?

Question

I'm a new comer to both Ruby (Watir) and Javascript. If an website uses Javascript code that dynamically (by clicking button or such) generates buttons, I have no idea how to access to them. It may have its own name or id, but I even can't check it, since the generated buttons aren't founded on the source code of a web page via browser...

I thought it could be an answer;

browser = Watir::Browser.new(:firefox)
browser.send_keys :tab

until I realized I seem not to have a way to refer to the focused button, even if I set the focus on the target by tab key...

EDIT: Thanks guys. I think it was a noob question now I just face another big problem (all the generated buttons share the exactly same attributes!!, so I can't specify which), but that's another story...

**EDIT2: I just solved my second question.

browser.button(:attribute => "same", :index => *).click

this!

Noob Question

2012.5 - 2012.5

Have you tried using a runtime browser debugger like either WebKit WebInspector (Chrome, Safari) or Firefox's Firebug? Those will show the DOM at runtime (which includes all the elements generated by Javascript). You can find the class or id's of the elements or XPath. — peakxu
A question to ask yourself when things are 'identical' is how would you identify which one to interact with if testing manually.. If the answer is 'the button to the right of xxxxx' or something similar, then you can often do something similar in your watir code. Start a new question for this topic, provide us with some sample HTML (you might have to get it via firebug) and we can discuss ways to do just that sort of logic, instead of using a fixed index which can be brittle and easy to break if the order of things ever changes. — Chuck van der Linden

Justin Ko Justin Ko · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-28T13:20:02

Firefox has a tool for inspecting elements. You should be able to right-click an element and select the 'Inspect Element' menu option. Then push the HTML button to view the source for that button.

Once you see the source, you should be able to determine its attributes to click the button like any other button (assuming the button is already made visible).

So you would have a script like:

browser = Watir::Browser.new(:firefox)
browser.goto('http://my.page')
#Click the button that generates the other buttons
browser.button(:id, 'generate_buttons_button').click 
#Click the newly displayed buttons once they appear
generated_button = browser.button(:id, 'generated_button')
generated_button.wait_until_present
generated_button.click

Watir - how to access to an input type = text element generated via Javascript?

1 Answers