Babysteps in WATIR

Watir is a tool you can use to automate internet explorer. It's name is an acronym for:

Watir is very easy to tinker with.

And we're coding already!

Now open the windows shell (cmd.exe), and type 'irb' to launch the interactive ruby shell.

_{(if this fails, then ruby may not have updated your PATH environment variable correctly. It happened to me. it could happen to you.)}


C:\>irb  <-- start the interactive ruby shell, 'irb' 

irb(main):001:0> require 'watir' <-- tell irb you'll be using the 'watir' library 

=> true

irb(main):002:0> ie = Watir::IE.new <-- open an IE browser, in a var called 'ie'  

=> #<Watir::IE:0x2bad438 @url_list=[], @typingspeed=0.08, @form=nil, @ie=#<WIN32

OLE:0x2bad3d8>, @logger=#<Watir::DefaultLogger:0x2bad378 @progname=nil, @logdev=

#<Logger::LogDevice:0x2bad318 @filename=nil, @dev=#<IO:0x27ce7d0>, @shift_size=n

il, @shift_age=nil>, @level=2, @datetime_format="%d-%b-%Y %H:%M:%S">, @error_che

ckers=[#<Proc:0x029198e8@./watir.rb:1135>], @defaultSleepTime=0.1, @activeObject

HighLightColor="yellow", @enable_spinner=false>

irb(main):003:0> ie.goto("http://google.com")  <-- tell 'ie' to browse to google 

=> 2.797

irb(main):004:0> ie.text_field(:name, "q").set("Yukihiro Matsumoto")



                ^^^^-- put the text 'Yukihiro Matsumoto' in the textbox named 'q' 

=> true
 
irb(main):005:0> ie.button(:name, "btnG").click <-- click the button called 'btnG' 

=> nil

irb(main):006:0>

Alternatively, you can type those commands into a file with a '.rb' extension.

require 'watir'
include Watir
ie = Watir::IE.new
ie.goto("http://google.com")
ie.text_field(:name, "q").set("Yukihiro Matsumoto")
ie.button(:name, "btnG").click

Run it from the command line by typing '[filename].rb' (where, um, '[filename]' is the name you chose for the file, got it?)

You should see internet explorer open up, the text 'Yukihiro Matsumoto' typed into the search box (which will turn yellow), and then the Search button turn yellow as it is clicked -- showing you the results of the search.

When you really get into it, you'll want to do a lot more with Watir than I've shown you here. But hopefully now you've got the tools to get you started.

A decent guide to using watir is provided here: watir user guide and of course, if you wish to automatically record a series of ie actions as a watir script -- use the new and improved tool from Scott Hanselman and Rutger Smit, called Watir Recorder++

One odd thing is that a lot of the cheat sheets in the ruby world are published as MS Word documents. So i've written a very short cheatsheet, just for using watir. It tells you how to reference each of the main types of controls.

Babysteps in WATIR

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Watir is very easy to tinker with.

And we're coding already!

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