I’ve recently been trying to get WATIR to work with IBM/MRO’s Maximo Asset Management solution. I got somewhere but it was a bit of a pain.

I was able to log in and navigate to the “Service Orders” window. I even managed (with some help – thanks Anne!) to click the “New Service Request” button (yeah, it wasn’t easy and required a bizarre hack) and got to the stage where I could enter in the details to create the service request. Unfortunately, I got stuck when trying to find the names of the text fields in that window – they just can’t be found! It’s probably a result of the DOM manipulation that I think Maximo is doing, since the HTML in “View Source” doesn’t match up at all with what’s on the screen – it’s not even close.

The Firebug Firefox extension would probably have helped, unfortunately I couldn’t use it since Maximo AM doesn’t seem to work with Firefox at all.

So, I imported the text field that I wanted to use into a Rational Functional Tester script, and it worked fine. RFT had no problem locating the object. The object hierarchy was *huge*, but at least it worked. And when I ran a script that used the text field, that worked too. So, thinking that if I copied the name of the text field into my WATIR script WATIR might be able to find it, I made the change and ran the script. Unknown Object Exception. After struggling with this for a couple of hours I admitted defeat. Which I don’t do lightly.

If anyone out there has managed to automate Maximo AM using WATIR or if you’ve run into the same problems, I’d love to know how you got on and how (if!) you got round these problems.