[Wtr-general] iec update: 2004.xxx.x

[Chris Morris]

Been coding away on the IEC codebase in prep for Austin, while 
simultaneously trying to fulfill some of the need for tests on IEC 
itself. I just committed some new code -- here's the latest changelog 
stuff in progress, though it ain't all necessarily working like I want 
it to.

I'm trying to make sure all changes keep IEC backward compatible ... but 
we don't have the tests to prove it right at the moment, though I do use 
the lib 'in production' for my own personal use. Anyway, as I notify the 
lists of these commits, if any of you want to get the latest from cvs 
and try it out, please do.

====2004.xxx.x
* ClIEController.form now has optional param to automatically wrap the DOM
  form instance in an IEDomFormWrapper instance.
* ClIEController.initialize now takes an options hash to specify, well,
  options. Two options at this point: visible and auto_wrap_form. This
  method is still backwards compatible -- if you pass in a boolean then
  the visible variable is set and all others ignored.
* Big refactoring/improvements in accessing DOM nodes:
  * IEDomFormWrapper used to have more funky code for wrapping widgets, now
    it's a more flexible plug-in-ish, polymorphing structure, with a
    separate subclass to wrap every node type (although only some node types
    are supported yet -- see readme.txt). Supporting additional node types
    will be much easier to add to the code now.
  * There were some limitations because the previous code favored element
    nodes instead of all nodes on the form. That's been fixed so that text
    nodes are not discriminated against.
  * Special code nonsense for ASP.NET labels has been removed, though should
    still be supported.
  * A new method_missing on ClIEController itself allows very easy access
    to DOM nodes (in and out of forms) that have id/name attributes.
    [there is still a little screwiness here using this method to talk to
     some form inputs].
    
    If the page has a link with an id like so:
   
      <a href='http://clabs.org' id=clabs>cLabs.org</a>
     
    You can simply call:

      @iec.clabs

    ... to click the link.

    Buttons with names/ids can be accessed the same way, other node
    types, etc.

    You can even add your own method_missing to forward calls to your @iec
    instance so your test scripts can look something like this:

      home
      browse
      apples
      add; add;
      checkout

    (unfortunately, assigning values to text inputs, for example, doesn't
     work with this method_missing approach, because Ruby interprets this:
   
       first_name = 'chris'
      
     as a local variable assignment, and it's never passed to
     method_missing. So it has to again be:
    
       @iec.first_name = 'chris')
      
* WindowsFormWrapper code for use against .NET Windows Forms that have COM
  interop enabled has been removed. This code lives in a file called
  dotnet.form.rb that's back in the old cLabs scrapware cliecontroller CVS
  repository.

-- 
Chris
http://clabs.org/blogki
http://cministries.org/blogki
-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-
Free solo piano album (mp3)
http://cministries.org/cstudios/blackandwhite.htm