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OperaWatir is a part of the Watir (pronounced water) family of free software Ruby libraries for automating web browsers. OperaWatir provides a querying engine and Ruby bindings for a backend Java library, OperaDriver, for driving the Opera web browser. It aims for full compliance with the watirspec specification.

Third-Party Libraries

OperaWatir uses the following libraries:

Install

Requirements

OperaWatir runs on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows operating systems. Required dependencies are Java >= 1.6.0, JRuby =< 1.5.5, RubyGems >= 1.3.5, RSpec = 2.4, and a somewhat recent desktop or nightly build of Opera. For Windows you must also have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86).

Installation procedure

Make sure that you have the right requirements for installing and running OperaWatir. Please note that OperaWatir will only run on the JRuby platform. For more detailed installation instructions, please see our Getting Started guide.

To install (leave out the “sudo” command if you're installing on Windows):

% sudo jruby -S gem install operawatir

Next, make sure that JRuby's bin directory is a part of your PATH environmental variable on GNU/Linux.

Limitations

Before you get started playing with OperaWatir, there are a few important things you need to keep in mind.

This is a pre-release of OperaWatir (0.3), and should not be considered stable or suitable for use in production. It should be treated as a proof of concept.

It is not possible to run OperaWatir without specifying the OPERA_PATH (full path to Opera binary) and OPERA_LAUNCHER (full path to Opera launcher binary) environmental variables.

Since the launcher applications are not shipped with the latest public release of Opera, we have bundled them with the gem. They can be found in ./utils/launchers/ under the gem's directory (typically /usr/lib/jruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/operawatir-0.3-java/utils/launchers/ on GNU/Linux systems and C:\JRuby-1.5.2\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\operawatir-0.3-java\utils\launchers\ on Windows). The launchers provided will work on 32-bit GNU/Linux and Windows operating systems. OS X support is planned.

Examples

The Watir API allows you to write scripts that interact with any web page. Its primary purpose is to ease test automation for web applications. Your scripts can, for example, before you deploy automatically go through all the steps your users normally would and alert you of any regressions.

Let's take a closer look at how this works. 

require 'rubygems'
require 'operawatir'

browser = OperaWatir::Browser.new

browser.goto 'http://en.wikipedia.org/'
browser.text_field(:id => 'searchInput').set 'Opera'
browser.button(:id => 'searchButton').click

The script above will tell the browser to load the front page of Wikipedia, write “Opera” in the search field and click the search button. If all goes as intended, the browser will end up at a relevant article.

To run the script, use the following command:

% jruby example.rb

As Watir scripts are run in a full-featured browser, all keypresses and clicks will be interpreted as if they were real, and invoke attached JavaScript event listeners. If we want to test the JavaScript-powered suggestion feature on the Wikipedia search box, we can do this: 

require 'rubygems'
require 'operawatir'

browser = OperaWatir::Browser.new

browser.goto 'http://en.wikipedia.org/'
browser.text_field(:id => 'searchInput').click
browser.type 'Hello world'
browser.key 'Down'
browser.key 'Enter'

The first suggested link will be selected by pressing arrow down ('Down') and navigated to ('Enter'). Using the same key events, you could even teach a script to play platform games: 

require 'rubygems'
require 'operawatir'

browser.goto 'http://www.phoboslab.org/biolab/'
sleep 2
browser.key 'X'
sleep 1
browser.key_down 'Right'
5.times { browser.key 'X' }
2.times { browser.key 'C' }
browser.key_up 'Right'

Sending commands to the browser is great, but sometimes we want to get something back too. The following lines of code will have the browser automatically look up the phone number of Opera Software in the yellow pages and write it to the console.

require 'rubygems'
require 'operawatir'

browser = OperaWatir::Browser.new

browser.goto 'http://gulesider.no/'
browser.text_field(:name => 'search_word').set 'Opera Software'
browser.button(:name => 'btn_cs').click
puts browser.li(:class => 'tel').text

When running proper functional tests on your web application with Watir, you might want a bit more structured output. To define assertions and get pretty test reports, you can use RSpec, a behaviour-driven testing framework.

When writing test suites you can use the OperaWatir::Helper class to help ease some tasks, such as constructing and tearing down the Browser object. A simple test suite looks like this:

describe 'Yellow Pages' do
  before :each do
    browser.goto 'http://gulesider.no/'
  end

  it 'finds the phone number to Opera Software' do
    browser.text_field(:name => 'search_word').set 'Opera Software'
    browser.button(:name => 'btn_cs').click
    browser.li(:class => 'tel').text.should == '24 16 40 00'
  end

  it 'finds the phone number to the Norwegian Opera and Ballet' do
    browser.text_field(:name => 'search_word').set 'Den Norske Opera'
    browser.button(:name => 'btn_cs').click
    browser.li(:class => 'tel').text.should == '21 42 21 00'
  end
end

Since this is an RSpec test you can run it using the operawatir binary, which is simply a shortcut for running tests: 

% operawatir yellow_pages.rb

Each block of code corresponds to a single named test case returning PASS or FAIL. Whether you got back the expected and correct return value is evaluated with .should. If all tests pass, you will see the following output: 

..

Finished in 2.04 seconds
2 examples, 0 failures

If anything fails, more information about each failure will be provided.