Watir on Windows XP – Installation

Watir – Web Application Testing in Ruby – I’m thinking about adding this as part of my standard Rails integration tests. I like the idea of capturing keystokes that a user might actually run. Plus, it makes for a dandy demo tool.

Here’s the summary of installation steps. I’m assuming you’re Rails-aware enough to have an application in place, and you know how to install Ruby gems:

Rails Side -

gem install watir

gem install tg4rb

Firefox Side -

Install the TestGen4Web add-on

Install the JSSH extension – start here to determine which version, and follow all the instructions on the page.

Once you restart Firefox, the TestGen4Web icon should be in the lower right hand corner – you click on that to bring up the tool bar. Then it’s just a matter of starting the record, capturing the keystrokes, stop recording, and then save the captured keystrokes to a file. The content will be XML, so use a .xml extension.

From the command line – sorry, Command Prompt window in MS-speak, run tg4rb on the file you saved: tg4rb /tmp/mykeystrokefile.xml – you will get a mykeystrokefile.rb in the same folder location.

Then run ruby mykeystrokefile.rb, and watch the magic.

I’ll add another blog about actually using this stuff, and I also need to see if I can do this on a Linux machine. Stay tuned.

PS – I can’t believe it’s been a month since my last blog. What a slacker. 8>)

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Posted by admin on May 28th, 2009 and is filed under Rails, Ruby.

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2 Responses to “Watir on Windows XP – Installation”

  1. richard wijdenes says:
    May 28th, 2009 at 3:49 PM

    You can do it very simple on a Linux machine. I’m using it on Ubuntu 9.04 and it works fine.

    Using the right jssh extension is important. See my posting in the watir-general. http://tr.im/mIXG

    on windows i’m also using webmetrics Ria scriptrecorder. http://tr.im/mIYK

    I like the rb output file from this scriptrecorder and prefer it above tg4rb.

  2. cwl says:
    May 28th, 2009 at 8:29 PM

    Hi Richard, thanks for the tip. The Webmetrics app is quite good, I’ll need to play with it a bit more. The Rails app I’m testing is almost pure AJAX, and nothing is working in that environment without a lot of manual hacks on the generated Ruby code, whether it’s from Scriptrecorder or tg4rb. I’ll publish my findings after I run some more evaulations. Thanks again for responding.