Watir test automation framework and AJAX

It is more challenging to implement automated tests for websites using dynamic AJAX requests which load data or elements on the fly. With Watir test automation framework there are several different approaches. We can insert some fixed sleeps before the checkpoints. However this is a bad solution in many cases because quite often we don't know the exact time it takes, also fixed sleeps can make our tests very slow, especially when we have a large test automation suite.

This is my solution for Watir test automation framework. It retries any operation with the element until success. If it fails for the first time, it retries again in 3 seconds, repeating 5 times until success. We can configure the maximum number of retries and the interval between each retry.

Implementation of the method in Ruby

	def ajax_handler(&block)
	tries = 5
	begin
	return yield
	rescue
	sleep(3)
	@browser.wait
	tries -= 1
	if tries > 0
	retry
	end
	end
	yield
	end

view raw ajax_handler.rb hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Usage examples

	ajax_handler { @browser.text_field(:xpath, "//input[@name='userID']").set("superuser") }
	ajax_handler { @browser.text.include?("sometext").should == true }

view raw ajax_handler_use.rb hosted with ❤ by GitHub