select - How do I set an option as selected using Selenium WebDriver (selenium 2.0) client in ruby

Question

I am trying to get familiar with the new ruby selenium-webdriver as it appears more intuitive mostly than the previous version of selenium and the ruby driver that went with it. Also, i had trouble getting the old selenium to work with ruby 1.9.1 in windows so I thought i'd look for an alternative. So far i've done this with my script:

require "selenium-webdriver"

driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for :firefox
driver.get "https://example.com"

element = driver.find_element(:name, 'username')
element.send_keys "mwolfe"
element = driver.find_element(:name, 'password')
element.send_keys "mypass"
driver.find_element(:id, "sign-in-button").click
driver.find_element(:id,"menu-link-my_profile_professional_info").click
driver.find_element(:id,"add_education_btn").click
country_select = driver.find_element(:name, "address_country")

So basically I'm logging into my site and trying to add an education entry to my user profile.. I have a reference to a select box with options (in the country_select variable) and now i want to select an option with a given value.. I don't see how to do this in the new client.. The only thing I can think of doing is looping through all the options until I find the one I want, and then call execute_script: http://selenium.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/docs/api/rb/Selenium/WebDriver/Driver.html#execute_script-class_method method to set the selectedIndex.

Is there any other way to do this? In the java api for selenium 2.0/webdriver here: http://seleniumhq.org/docs/09_webdriver.html there is an example of doing this

Select select = new Select(driver.findElement(By.xpath("//select")));
select.deselectAll();
select.selectByVisibleText("Edam");

It doesn't appear that the ruby version has this feature though unless I'm missing something. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Full disclosure here: I have absolutely no working knowledge of Ruby.

However, I'm pretty good with Selenium so I think I can help. I think what you're looking for is the select method. If ruby is anything like the other drivers you can use the select method to tell one of the options it is selected.

In pseudocode/java terms it would look something like this

    WebElement select = driver.findElement(By.name("select"));
    List<WebElement> options = select.findElements(By.tagName("option"));
    for(WebElement option : options){
        if(option.getText().equals("Name you want")) {
            option.click();
            break;
        }
    }

The Select object you have above is actually in a special Support package. It only exists for Java and .Net at the moment (Jan 2011)