Another release of bewildr… a few important changes:

• (hopefully) fixed waiting-for-window timeout problem (ht: mrwizard82d1)
• passing :how_many => :all to #get will always return an array regardless of how many elements were found, you no longer have to cater for a nil result – what was I thinking?
• comboboxes and lists with no items will return an empty array instead of nil when asked for their items
• added next_sibling and previous_sibling methods to Element

Bewildr is one year old today! The first gem push doesn’t seem that long ago… At almost 2,100 downloads since it launched last year, bewildr is doing quite well – much better than I’d anticipated! It’s the 3rd most downloaded ironruby gem on rubygems.org!

I initially wrote bewildr as a response to a frustrating experience using White through IronRuby. I’m pleased to report that the CMS for the BBC News site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news) is tested using bewildr (cucumber scenarios executed by Hudson twice a day); and White has been completely retired. The test automation people tell me that using bewildr is a much more pleasant experience than using White ever was – that’s certainly true for me, but then it would be, wouldn’t it

Things I need to improve:

• documentation (rdoc and wiki)
• more frequent releases
• remove dirt from the API
• add more tests
• make certain defaults configurable (timeouts, etc)
• add some tutorials

Please keep raising bugs, and let me know what you think!

—UPDATE—

All better now. Bewildr 0.1.11 has just been released that works with IronRuby 1.1.1 and the new 1.1.2.

The problem was this: IronRuby 1.1.2 implements Ruby 1.9.2, while IronRuby 1.1.1 implemented ruby 1.8.6.  Calling .select on a hash in 1.8.6 resulted in a 2D array (daft), whereas doing the same in 1.9.2 returns a new hash. The fix was just to check what version of ruby is being run and if it’s 1.8.6, flatten the result of the .select method, and convert it to a hash. Nice and easy.If it’s 1.9.2, do nothing – it already does what I want.

This exercise also demonstrated the value of automated tests – put in the fix, run the tests in IronRuby 1.1.1. It still works. Flip to 1.1.2 and run the tests again… they all work too. Commit, tag, push the changes, push the new gem version. Done!

gem update bewildr

—Original Post—

Bewildr is not compatible with IronRuby 1.1.2.  I’ll be releasing an update shortly, but for now, stick with IronRuby 1.1.1.

If you’ve installed 1.1.2, you’ll get the following error:

undefined method `flatten' for {:id=>"my_button"}:Hash (NoMethodError)
./lib/bewildr/finder.rb:20:in `condition_for'
./lib/bewildr/element.rb:102:in `get'


I’m on it.

This is a quick release just to add the visible? method to the Element class. It’s not very sophisticated at the moment as it just checks the IsOffscreen property of the underlying AutomationElement object – it’ll get more robust as time goes on.

gem update bewildr

Go! Go! Go!