Ruby: Rerunning a loop with different code if end criteria is met - ruby

Question

I have this program I wrote to automate a task I have at work. This is my first attempt at programming, with zero experience or training so forgive any silly mistakes. (I removed the website and my username/password)
require "rubygems"
require "selenium-webdriver"
require "nokogiri"
browser = Selenium::WebDriver.for :firefox
wait = Selenium::WebDriver::Wait.new(:timeout => 15)
#loads to unassigned results page
browser.get "-----------------"
p browser.title
browser.find_element(name: "user[username]").send_keys "--------"
browser.find_element(name: "user[password]").send_keys "--------"
browser.find_element(name: "commit").click
p browser.title
browser.find_element(class_name: "status_notification").click
begin
browser.find_element(:xpath => ".//*[#id='sub_nav_content']/table/tbody/tr[2]/td[3]/a").click
table = wait.until {
element = browser.find_element(id: "possible_matched")
element if element.displayed?
}
if table
puts "Table Found"
else
puts "Table Error"
end
#creates an 2D array containing patient name, admit date and prints to screen
names = browser.find_elements(:xpath => ".//*[#id='possible_matched']/table/tbody/tr/td[1]")
name_array = []
names.each { |name| name_array << name.text}
admits = browser.find_elements(:xpath => ".//*[#id='possible_matched']/table/tbody/tr/td[5]")
admit_array = []
admits.each { |date| admit_array << date.text }
name_admit_array = name_array.zip(admit_array)
name_admit_array.each do |name, date|
puts "#{name}: #{date}"
end
#finds the location of the sub-array containing patient name and collection associated admit date
patient_name = browser.find_element(:xpath => ".//*[#id='dialog-modal-cancel-hl7-preview']/table/tbody/tr[2]/td[1]").text
collected_date = browser.find_element(:xpath => ".//*[#id='dialog-modal-cancel-hl7-preview']/table/tbody/tr[2]/td[4]").text
mo, da, yr = collected_date.split('/').map(&:to_i)
cd = [yr, mo, da]
bl = name_admit_array.each_with_index.select { |(name, date), i|
m, d, y = date.split('/').map(&:to_i)
dt = [y, m, d]
name.downcase == patient_name.downcase and (dt <=> cd)<0
}.map {|x, i| i }
# presses the button associated with the correct sub-array
blf = name_admit_array.values_at(*bl)
if bl.any?
bf = blf.rindex(blf.max) + 2
browser.find_element(:xpath => ".//*[#id='possible_matched']/table/tbody/tr[#{bf}]/td[6]/div/a").click
else
browser.find_element(:xpath => "html/body/div[6]/div[1]/a/span").click
end
end while bl.any?
puts "no name :("
So it runs the loop until there is nothing found in the array bl. What I want to do is have this loop run again but with the next link on the list of links. So at the beginning of the loop it should do browser.find_element(:xpath => ".//*[#id='sub_nav_content']/table/tbody/tr[3]/td[3]/a").clickinstead of browser.find_element(:xpath => ".//*[#id='sub_nav_content']/table/tbody/tr[2]/td[3]/a").click. Then is should run the rest of the loop in the same way. I want it to continue to increment tr[] each time the loop runs into br.any? => false.

Answer 1

you can create an array of xpaths, and run this code for each of them:
[
".//*[#id='sub_nav_content']/table/tbody/tr[3]/td[3]/a",
".//*[#id='sub_nav_content']/table/tbody/tr[2]/td[3]/a"
].each do |path|
begin
browser.find_element(:xpath => path).click
// etc....
end while bl.any?
end
I believe that more changes need to adjust your code reusable, depending on your needs