Ruby Watir - how to select <a onclick="new Ajax.Request - ruby

Question

Hi I'm trying to select an edit button and I am having difficulty selecting it.
<td>
<a onclick="new Ajax.Request('/media/remote/edit_source/3', {asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true}); return false;" href="#">
<img title="Edit" src="/media/images/edit.gif?1258500617" alt="Edit">
</a>
I have the number at the end of ('/media/remote/edit_source/3') the which changes and I have stored it in #rep_id variable.
I can't use xpath because the table changes often. Any suggestions? Any help is greatly appreciated. Below is what I have tried and fails. I am fairly new to watir and love it, but occasionally I run into things like this and get stumped.
browser.a(:text, "/media/remote/edit_source/#{#rep_id}").when_present.click

Answer 1

The line:
browser.a(:text, "/media/remote/edit_source/#{#rep_id}").when_present.click
fails because:
The content you are looking for is in the onclick attribute (rather than the text)
The locator is passed a string for the second parameter. This means that it is looking for something that exactly matches that. Given that you are only using part of the text/attribute, you need to use a regexp.
If you are using watir-webdriver, there is support for locating an element by its :onclick attribute. You can use a regexp to partially match the :onclick attribute.
browser.link(:onclick => /#{Regexp.escape("/media/remote/edit_source/#{#rep_id}")}/).when_present.click
If you are also using watir-classic (for IE testing), the above will not work. Instead, you can check the html of the link. Checking the html also works in watir-webdriver, but could be less robust than using :onclick.
browser.link(:html => /#{Regexp.escape("/media/remote/edit_source/#{#rep_id}")}/).when_present.click

Answer 2

From your example, it looks like you are using the URL from the onclick event handler as a :text locator, which I'd expect to fail unless that text does exist.
You could potentially click on the img. Examples:
browser.image(:title, "Edit").click
browser.image(:src, "/media/images/edit.gif?1258500617").click
browser.image(:src, /edit\.gif\?\d{10}/).click # regex the src
Otherwise, you might need to use the fire_event method to trigger the event handler, which looks like this:
browser.link(:id, "foo").fire_event "onclick"
These are the links to the fire_event docs for watir and watir-webdriver for reference.