Get Elements By Attributes

Question

i will be short.

As far as i know watir library provides two methods for getting html elements.

Almost for each element (div, button, table, li, etc) watir provides two methods:

. One is the 'singular' method which gets only one specific element. For example:

watir_instance.div(:id,'my_div_id')
watir_instance.link(:href,'my_link_href')
watir_instance.button(:class =>'my_button_class', :index => 4)

These methods will only retrieve A SINGLE ELEMENT. Thats ok...

. The second is the 'plural' method that will retrieve ALL the elements of the watir instance

watir_instance.divs
watir_instance.links
watir_instance.buttons

But as far as i know watir doesn't provide a method to get more than one element giving certain conditions.

For example... If i want to flash all the links with id:my_link_id it would be very easy to do something like this:

watir_instance.divs(:id, 'my_link_id').each do |link|
  link.flash
end

With hpricot this task is very easy... but if your aim is not to parse i couldn't find a Watir Method that does what i want.

Hope you can understand me...

Cheers, Juan!!

Answer 1

Juan,

your script has several problems:

• You say you want to flash all links, but then you use watir_instance.divs. It should be watir_instance.links
• you pass arguments to divs method: watir_instance.divs(:id, 'my_link_id'). It should be just watir_instance.divs

Your example is also strange:

i want to flash all the links with id:my_link_id

As far as I know, id should be unique at the page.

So, here are different examples:

1) Flash all links on this page:

require "watir"
b = Watir::IE.start "http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1434697"
b.links.each do |link|
  link.flash
end

2) Flash all links on this page that have questions in URL (bonus: scroll the page so the link that is flashed is visible):

require "watir"
b = Watir::IE.start "http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1434697"
b.links.each do |link|
  if link.href =~ /questions/
    link.document.scrollintoview
    link.flash
  end
end