Watir: Finding the Parent div containing a specific child

Question

I have the following HTML Structure:

<div class="items">
  ...some complex structure with many sub divs ...
                     <div id="specificchild"></div>
</div>
<div class="items>
  ... 
</div>

and i need to get to the DIV with the class item, that contains the "specificchild"-DIV. The Problem is that the specificchild is not directly related to the parent div "items" and also the structur in between is not always the same. So

browser.div(:id => "specificchild").parent

wont work.

Is there a possibility to select the div without looping through all of them and asking if it contains the "specificchild"?

Answer 1

Solution 1 - Xpath

In this case, I think the easiest solution is to use xpath:

browser.div(:xpath, '//div[@class="items"][.//div[@id="specificchild"]]')

Solution 2 - Iterating Until Parent

Alternatively, you could find the specificchild element like you normally do. Then iterate item the parents until the one with class 'items' is found:

item = browser.div(:id => 'specificchild')
item = item.parent until item.class_name == 'items'

Solution 3 - Using find

Another option is getting a collection of the divs with class items and then finding the one with the specific child. It will only iterate through the divs until the desired one is found.

browser.divs(:class => 'items').find{ |item| item.div(:id => 'specificchild').exists? }