Ruby/Selenium WebDriver 2: Find New Elements Fast - ruby

Question

Environment:
Ruby 1.8.7
Selenium WebDriver 2
Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop
Firefox 13.0.1
Problem:
I have div tags being used as selects. You click on the div and a dropdown style window shows up with more div tags as the select options. Now I can go in and create a way of clicking on each of these options for each 'div as select' but what I'd really like is to write a piece of code that clicks on the divs I know about and then determines which divs are now displayed and enabled after the click. Then I can click on 1 of the options at random.
So my current code is something like this:
allDivs = brwsr.find_elements(:tag_name, 'div')
origDivs = allDivs
allDivs.each do |e|
if ... # Get the div I want
e.click
newDivs = brwsr.find_elements(:tag_name, 'div')
origDivs.each do |orig|
newDivs.delete(orig)
end
# Do something with remaining new divs here
end
end
The main problem I have is that this is extremely slow. I currently have around 200 divs to spin thru and this method takes a few minutes to complete. Normally, I wouldn't expect spinning thru a couple of hundred array elements to take very long. But it does.
To shorten the time I've attempted filtering the allDivs and newDivs by spinning thru them once and deleting anything that is not displayed and enabled.
So I'm currently stuck with a really slow solution. I don't mind this 'finding of new divs' being a little slower as it should also lead to much shorter script dev times. However, taking minutes to complete is way too long.
First question: Can Selenium return only elements which as displayed and enabled with some extra API string around the find_elements call?
Second question: Does someone have a better way of finding the new div elements without having to go thru the array of elements.

Answer 1

It would be very helpful if you could post some sample HTML of the DOM you are trying to automate.
With that said, the ruby webdriver bindings do support finding elements by chaining. Thus, given some html like this:
<div class="outer">
<div class="one">
<div class="alpha">A</div>
<div class="beta">B</div>
<div class="gamma">C</div>
</div>
<div class="two">
<div class="alpha">A</div>
<div class="beta">B</div>
<div class="gamma">C</div>
</div>
<div class="three">
<div class="alpha">A</div>
<div class="beta">B</div>
<div class="gamma">C</div>
</div>
</div>
You could write something like this to find the "B" div in the second group of divs ("two"):
group = brwsr.find_element(:class => "two")
desired_item = group.find_element(:class => "beta")
Or, even more simply through ruby's chaining capabilities:
desired_item = brwsr.find_element(:class => "two").find_element(:class => "beta")
One other way, which I prefer the most is to select an element via a CSS selector, which selects the element faster with an easy to read syntax:
desired_item = brwsr.find_element(:css => "div.two div.beta")