Thanks for your detailed replies. Comments inline. Christopher Rasch wrote: > Well, ultimately, I want to be able to handle any popup that the browser > throws up: attach to it, manipulate it, etc. My understanding is > that better modal dialog support is one of the new features of Watir > 1.5. See here: > > http://wiki.openqa.org/display/WTR/Watir+1.5+Summary > Right. We added support for handling the IE-specific showModalDialog() in Watir 1.5. As Chris said, there is a terminology problem.
Technically, any dialog that blocks access to the main page while it is posted is modal. There are many technologies that allow this. 1. Javascript alert() and confirm() 2. The showModalDialog() mentioned above 3. Various security and authentication dialogs 4. File dialogs such as save as. 5. More recently, there are ajax modal dialogs that appear within the page. Watir 1.5 supports the modal_dialog command which supports #2 above. A good argument could be made that it needs to have a more-specific name. > And here: > > Deliver new DLL that allows us to access DOM embedded in modal web dialogs > http://jira.openqa.org/browse/WTR-14 > > WIN32OLE patch for Modal Web Dialog Support > http://jira.openqa.org/browse/WTR-2 > Both of these tickets relate to improving the existing modal web dialog support (showModalDialog). At this point, I no longer have plans to work on them and no one else has volunteered to work on them. Probably the biggest problem with our current support for showModalDialog is that it only works with Ruby 1.8.2. Fixing this would require that IEDialog.dll be rewritten as an activex component. > Provide cleaner interface and more reliable support for modal windows > dialogs (i.e. replace winClicker.rb) > http://jira.openqa.org/browse/WTR-4 > Although this is desirable and many people have talked about helping with this, we've seen few actual contributions. Personally, i have almost always found ways to avoid these dialogs, so I have never had much motivation to fix this myself. > Since integration of the various watirs is also part of the roadmap, I > expect that some of the better modal dialog support will also be > migrated to the other watir flavors. Perhaps I have the wrong impression? > The show_modal_dialog support in watir 1.5 is specific to IE. So no. It would be handy to have a better windows library for handling general windows dialogs, and if we had that, then it would also help for firefox -- you could use it there too, although I know that Angrez is focussing on features that would not be platform specific. All of the mechanisms that we currently using in Watir (autoit, winclicker, win32api) are windows specific, so known of them would be migrated to other platforms. Bret _______________________________________________ Wtr-general mailing list Wtr-general@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general
