Ruby/Watir - storing watir objects in hash? - ruby

Question

I'm new to Ruby, and I LOVE IT.
Playing around with Watir-Webdriver.
I want to store the reference to watir objects in a hash and save it to disk, WITHOUT having first defined the #browser variable.
For example
elements = {
:home => #browser.a(:href => /home.php/),
:photo => #browser.img(:id => "photo"),
:about => #browser.a(:href => /about.php/)
}
so that further I can do something like:
el = elements
el[:home].click
el[:photo].wait_until_present
el[:about].click
obviously this works if I define #browser at the very beginning..
#browser = Watir::Browser.new
but what if I want to store the 'elements' hash as YAML in a file?
Should I store the values as quoted strings and eval them on the fly? like
elements = {
:home => "#browser.a(:href => /home.php/)",
# etc...
}
# store elements as YAML file...
# load elements from YAML file
el = YAML::load_file "elements.yml"
eval(el[:home]).click
eval(el[:photo].wait_until_present
# etc...
is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

Build a Class to provide access to #browser based on your YAML config.
Modify your elements structure to include the data you need rather than code. Consider this a config hash/file of sorts for your new Class.
elements = {
:home => { :tag => "a", :select => { :href => /home.php/ } },
:photo => { :tag => "img", :select => { :id => "photo" } },
:about => { :tag => "a", :select => { :href => /about.php/ } }
}
Build a class to load the elements YAML file and provide access to what you need from #browser based on what is loaded.
class WatirYamlBrowserSelect
# To store your config and browser.
attr_accessor :elements, :browser
def initialize elements_yaml_file
#elements = YAML.load_file elements_yaml_file
end
# Retrieve a configured element from Watir Browser.
def element name
#browser.send( #elements[name][:tag], #elements[name][:select] )
end
end
Then when you need to use it
# Create an instance of your selector.
s = WatirYamlBrowserSelect.new( "elements.yaml" )
# Add the browser when you have it
s.browser #browser
# Access the #browser elements
s.element :home
s.element :photo
s.element :about

Answer 2

Alister Scott's blog as well as its code in github was the template I used for building all the page objects for a few projects. I think it should solve the repetition issues you described. It also solves the problem of maintaining too many variables for too many pages of objects and keeps objects organized by page and not in a more complex data structure, especially when the number of objects increases.
http://watirmelon.com/2011/06/07/removing-local-page-references-from-cucumber-steps/
http://watirmelon.com/2012/06/04/roll-your-own-page-objects/
https://github.com/alisterscott/wmf-custom-page-object