Automating Internet Explorer with Ruby: Without Watir

In a previous post, I discussed how to use the watir library to automate Microsoft Internet Explorer. I should also mention that you can also do this directly, using the win32ole library. Let's take a look at how to do this...

First, require the win32ole library...

require 'win32ole'

Create a new instance of Internet Explorer...

ie = WIN32OLE.new('InternetExplorer.Application')

(NOTE: You cannot use the WIN32OLE.connect method to connect to a running instance of Internet Explorer, as you would do, for example, with Excel or Word. I'll explain later how to do this via the Windows Shell. Stay tuned...)

You can show or hide the IE window by setting the Visible property...

ie.Visible = true

Navigate to a URL using the Navigate method...

ie.Navigate('http://google.com')

Wait until IE has completed loading the page, by checking the ReadyState property...

sleep(1) until ie.ReadyState == 4

When a web page is loaded into IE, the contents of the page are represented by the Document object. The document object's All method returns a collection of all elements within the document, such as input textboxes, links, buttons, etc. You may reference a document element by name, which you will find in the HTML code for that page. For example, viewing the source for the google.com top page shows us, among others things, that we have a textbox named 'q' and a button named 'btnG'...

input maxlength=2048 name=q size=55 title="Google Search" value=""
input name=btnG type=submit value="Google Search"

Let's enter a value into the textbox named 'q' by setting its Value property...

ie.Document.All.q.Value = 'ruby on windows'

...and then click the button named 'btnG', by calling its Click method...

ie.Document.All.btnG.click

...and wait until IE has completed loading the page...

sleep(1) until ie.ReadyState == 4

The Document.All.Tags method returns a collection of all elements with the specified HTML tag, such as 'a', 'tr', or 'input'. So, to get a collection of all links, you could do this...

links = ie.Document.All.Tags('a')

You could then iterate over this collection...

for link in links do
    puts link.InnerText  # print the link's text
    puts link.href       # print the link's URL
end

To quit IE, call the application object's Quit method...

ie.Quit

There is much more to automating IE than I what I have presented here, but this will hopefully get you started. As always, feel free to post a comment here or email me if there is a specific task or topic that you would like to see discussed here.

This is all about helping you make better use of Ruby on Windows.

Thanks for stopping by!