What to do in a Watir test if you don’t have a unique id

OK, you don’t have ids on the controls you need to access.  Now what do you do.  I was faced with this situation.  I needed to verify that one menu item followed another.  Neither of the menu items had an id.  I could simply use indicies on the links.  That would have made for a very brittle test (one that breaks easily).  I happened to notice that the parent cell (TD) had a unique class (sideNav).  If I could associate my test with that cell, it would be a bit more stable.

Within the cell was a list structure (UL), with each list item (LI) followed by a link that contained text.  I was supposed to make sure that the link with text of “Item-of-Interest” was followed by the link with the text “Following-Item”.  The structure of this list was very regular: list item followed by a link, followed by text, followed by the next list item.
<TD class=sideNav>
    <UL>
       <LI>
         <A>
            #text
       <LI>
         <A>
            #text
       <LI>
         <A>
            #text
       <LI>
         <A>
            #text
       <LI>
         <A>
            #text
       <LI>
         <A>
            #text     <– Item-of-Interest
       <LI>
         <A>
            #text     <– Following-Item
       <LI>
         <A>
            #text
If I just used indicies to locate the links, an additional link to Item-of-Interest in front of the list could break the test.  That is not an unusual situation on our website.  In addition, using the “sideNav” class provided some additional insurance that I was testing what I thought I was testing.  I decided I could locate the cell with class=sideNav, loop through the list until I found the first text I was looking for and test the next link to see that it had the “Following-Item” text.  The code below is a sample of how to implement the test.

i = 1
while $br.cell(:class, "sideNav").ul(:index,1).li(:index, i).link(:index, 1).exists?
   if $br.cell(:class, "sideNav").ul(:index,1).li(:index, i).link(:index, 1).text =~ /Item-of-Interest/i
      if $br.cell(:class, "sideNav").ul(:index,1).li(:index, i + 1).link(:index, 1).exists?
         assert($br.cell(:class, "sideNav").ul(:index,1).li(:index, i + 1).link(:index, 1).text =~ /Following-Item/i)
      end
   end
   i += 1
end

The statement that begins with “while” and ends with “.exists?” is there to prevent the test from failing with an exception if the combination does not exist.  I loop through the list items with an index so that once I find the first text, I will look for the “Following-Item” text at index+1.  Again, I do an “exists?” test before I do the assert to keep the code from throwing an exception.

It turns out that this worked out OK for testing this condition.  Although it is not the best situation, using the cell class to identify the area was better than just using indicies.

Tags: automated software testing, Ruby, software testing, Watir