All the selenium locators are WATIR's locators as well, I don't have to use element method if you don't like it, I could use link method as well with
b.link(link: 'something').click it will still call selenium equivalent of driver.find_element(link: 'something').click no difference, but when we choose to write xpath, there is higher chance that it would break if it's lengthily. And also, If you use b.link(text: 'something').click It would create the selenium equivalent of driver.find_element(xpath: "//link[noramlize-space()='something']").click It would perfectly work if this xpath matches only one, but there are more and rest of them are hidden it would choose to click the first one, not the one which is visible, but If you write the below code b.element(link: 'something').click Or b.link(link: 'something').click It would write the selenium equivalent of driver.find_element(link: 'something').click it would perfectly choose the visible one by rejecting all the invisible one, You may say to me that I could achieve the same by passing 'visible: true' as the second parameter, but WATIR does here is, it iterates over all the links before it chooses the visible one. So using link: over xpath: has many advantages, That's why I said we need to go for xpath when we can't use any other available locators. On Tuesday, October 24, 2017 at 8:22:36 PM UTC+5:30, Titus Fortner wrote: > > If you want to use Watir without its powerful element location API, and > use only the element method and only Selenium locators, you are more than > welcome to do that. > But stop telling other users that it's the right way to do it or that it's > better, because it isn't. > > Watir provides an easy way for the user to combine multiple location > strategies to uniquely identify an element without needing to use XPath. > What Watir sends to the driver is irrelevant to the user. > > XPath for the user => Bad > XPath for the driver => Good > > Separating what the user knows and what the driver knows is the whole > point, and your comments are only confusing the issue. > > > > On Tuesday, October 24, 2017 at 4:39:48 AM UTC-5, rajagopal...@gmail.com > wrote: >> >> yes, that's what I am saying xpath usage must be the last one. If we >> could use available selenium-webdriver locators then we need to prefer that >> one. >> >> On Monday, October 23, 2017 at 7:28:06 PM UTC+5:30, Titus Fortner wrote: >>> >>> The only reasons not to use xpath are that it is hard to read, and >>> difficult to write such that it is not brittle. Neither of these apply to >>> how Watir implements its location system. >> >> >>> >>> -- -- Before posting, please read http://watir.com/support. In short: search before you ask, be nice. watir-general@googlegroups.com http://groups.google.com/group/watir-general watir-general+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Watir General" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to watir-general+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
