CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubywatir
user137369
user137369

Reputation: 5705

Chain Watir commands

As an example, I’d like to get my browser’s user agent as output from http://www.useragentstring.com/ and store it in a variable. Currently, I can do it in multiple lines

require 'watir'
b = Watir::Browser.new(:chrome)
b.goto('http://www.useragentstring.com/')
agent = b.textarea.text
b.close

Ideally, I’d like to do it in a single line. Something like

require 'watir'
agent = Watir::Browser.new(:chrome).goto('http://www.useragentstring.com/').textarea.text

But that fails with

NoMethodError: undefined method `textarea' for "http://www.useragentstring.com/":String`

So while the goto part works, the rest doesn’t. Since watir lets us do things like wait_until_present.click, I’m hoping there’s some way to chain these methods as well. Is this even possible?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 159

Answers (2)

Justin Ko
Justin Ko

Reputation: 46846

You can make anything chain-able by using the tap method. As described by the Ruby Docs:

Yields self to the block, and then returns self. The primary purpose of this method is to “tap into” a method chain, in order to perform operations on intermediate results within the chain.

That means that you can use tap to call goto and still have the Watir::Browser instance for calling textarea:

agent = Watir::Browser.new(:chrome).tap{ |b| b.goto('http://www.useragentstring.com/') }.textarea.text

Upvotes: 3

Engr. Hasanuzzaman Sumon
Engr. Hasanuzzaman Sumon

Reputation: 2183

Though goto method does not support chaining you can make your custom method for Watir::Browser like following 

class Watir::Browser
  def chain_goto(url)
    goto(url)
    self
  end
end

Then you can use that like Watir::Browser.new(:firefox).chain_goto('http://www.useragentstring.com/').textarea.text.

So the complete code will be like

require 'watir'

class Watir::Browser
  def chain_goto(url)
    goto(url)
    self
  end
end

b = Watir::Browser.new(:firefox).chain_goto('http://www.useragentstring.com/'.textarea.text

Upvotes: 1

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