Access full page source in WatiN - watin

Question

I am looking for a way to pass my webpages through a DTD validator as part of my WatiN tests, but I haven't found a clean way to access the raw HTML yet. Is there a built-in way to do it?
I think I could access the property IE.InternetExplorer and QueryInterface for the IPersistStreamInit interface and serialize the document to an IStream, but it seems like a lot of work for what I guess must be a fairly common task.
Am I missing something obvious in WatiN? Or can someone think of a better solution than the one I outlined above? That solution is very IE specific after all.

Answer 1

Here is how you access the source code:
browser.ActiveElement.Parent.OuterHtml

Answer 2

string html = browser.Body.Parent.OuterHtml;

Answer 3

There doesn't appear to be a better way. I filed a feature request and submitted a patch at WatiN's sourceforge tracker instead.

Answer 4

Thought to drop some lines to help anyone struggling out there to get the pristine HTML source of a web page via WatiN without, however, patching WatiN - just as a matter of taste.
So capitalizing on Johan Levin's patch I bolted together the following. Be safe and hope you find it useful.
private static TextVariant GetWebPageSource(IE browser)
{
IHTMLDocument2 htmlDocument = ((IEDocument)(browser.DomContainer.NativeDocument)).HtmlDocument;
Encoding encoding = Encoding.GetEncoding(htmlDocument.charset);
IPersistStreamInit persistStream = (IPersistStreamInit)htmlDocument;
MinimalIStream stream = new MinimalIStream();
persistStream.Save(stream, false);
return new TextVariant(encoding.GetString(stream.ToArray()));
}
[Guid("7FD52380-4E07-101B-AE2D-08002B2EC713")]
[InterfaceTypeAttribute(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIUnknown)]
public interface IPersistStreamInit
{
void GetClassID(out Guid pClassID);
int IsDirty();
void Load(IStream pStm);
void Save(IStream pStm, bool fClearDirty);
void GetSizeMax(out long pcbSize);
void InitNew();
}
// http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6601355/passing-an-fstream-or-equivalent-from-c-to-c-through-cli
[ClassInterface(ClassInterfaceType.AutoDispatch)]
public class MinimalIStream : MemoryStream, IStream
{
public MinimalIStream() { }
public MinimalIStream(byte[] data) : base(data) { }
#region IStream Members
public void Write(byte[] pv, int cb, IntPtr pcbWritten)
{
base.Write(pv, 0, cb);
if (pcbWritten != IntPtr.Zero)
Marshal.WriteInt64(pcbWritten, (long)cb);
}
public void Stat(out STATSTG pstatstg, int grfStatFlag)
{
pstatstg = new STATSTG();
pstatstg.cbSize = base.Length;
}
public void Read(byte[] pv, int cb, IntPtr pcbRead)
{
long bytes_read = base.Read(pv, 0, cb);
if (pcbRead != IntPtr.Zero) Marshal.WriteInt64(pcbRead, bytes_read);
}
public void Seek(long dlibMove, int dwOrigin, IntPtr plibNewPosition)
{
long pos = base.Seek(dlibMove, (SeekOrigin)dwOrigin);
if (plibNewPosition != IntPtr.Zero) Marshal.WriteInt64(plibNewPosition, pos);
}
public void Clone(out IStream ppstm)
{
ppstm = null;
}
public void Commit(int grfCommitFlags)
{
}
public void CopyTo(IStream pstm, long cb, IntPtr pcbRead, IntPtr pcbWritten)
{
}
public void LockRegion(long libOffset, long cb, int dwLockType)
{
}
public void SetSize(long libNewSize)
{
}
public void Revert()
{
}
public void UnlockRegion(long libOffset, long cb, int dwLockType)
{
}
#endregion
}

Answer 5

I found:
browser.ActiveElement.Parent.OuterHtml
will not always get everything, as is dependant on your 'ActiveElement', Therefore:
browser.Body.Parent.OuterHtml
seems to work better. (browser being your instance of IE)
Though I believe Johan Levin is correct in saying the DOM is serialised back to text format.
Therefore would it not be easier to just fetch the document by it's URL (without using WatiN) to validate it.