What is Watir?

Watir means “Web Application Testing in Ruby.” It’s an easy way to automate the testing of your Web Apps through a Ruby interactive console. Watir will click buttons, fill in forms, navigate to pages, you name it. It’s also compatible with all major browsers.

How do I get started?

So let’s say hypothetically you have an HTML5 web app using jQuery Mobile running on top of ASP.NET MVC 3. A quick and easy way to test the UI functionality of a new user registration would be to use Watir.

The Test

The code

I’ve included the sample code so that you can try it out on the site I made for testing

#INTERACTIVE TESTING WITH RUBY GEMS
#LOAD UP RUBY GEMS, Watir and Watir-webdriver
require 'rubygems'
#this is for IE
require 'watir'
#this is for Chrome
#require 'watir-webdriver'
#load Browser
b = Watir::Browser.new 

#go to URL
b.goto 'http://watirtesting.apphb.com/'

#Select the Register Link
l = b.link(:name,"Register")
l.exists?
l.click

#Populate Register Fields
b.text_field(:name, "UserName").set("Fake Name")
b.text_field(:name, "Email").set("SampleUser@SampleUser.org")
b.text_field(:name, "Password").set("Password12345")
b.text_field(:name, "ConfirmPassword").set("Password12345")

#Create New User
b.button(:value => 'Register').click

Who uses Watir?

• Facebook
• SAP
• Oracle
• Yahoo
• Expedia

Get Watir

Watir can be downloaded here. You’ll need to install ruby as well. All watir commands can be run from the Ruby Interactive Console.