WatiN SelectList Methods - Page not refreshing/actions not being fired after interacting with a select list

Question

Preface:

If you don't care about the preface, skip down to the section marked "Question."

Hi,

Recently my company has upgraded to the latest version of WatiN for its test automation framework. We upgraded to avoid a problem where interacting with a select list would cause an ACCSES DENIED error. This error seems to be a product of the fact that our web application reloads the page it is on (which sits in a frame which sits in a frameset) with new fields after certain select lists options are selected. It could also be that our framework, which wraps around WatiN, often does actions on the same SelectList after the page refresh (I'm still looking into this, I'm new to the framework).

The new version of WatiN does solve the ACCESS DENIED error, but also seems to stop select lists from firing the action that causes the page to reload w/ its new options. In fact, if you use WatiN to make the selection, the select list won't work correctly, even if manually interacted with, until the page has been forced to refresh.

Question:

When selecting an option in a SelectList using the newest WatiN code, the event that causes our web app's page to reload with new fields/values does not execute. What are some possibilities that could cause this?

The term i've seen used most often to describe the refreshing that occurs when our select lists are used is "double post-back".

Many thanks, Chad

Answer 1

This is part of the new WatiN code. The new code, if you look into the SelectList class has comments about the fact that it has been changed so that these events don't exactly fire. It says something along the lines of "you may need to use a key press or other event to get a select list to fire its events".

This didn't work for me so we went back to the old code.

One thing that has helped is wrapping calls to the select list w/ a try/catch(System.UnauthorizedAccess e) and then doing a .Refresh on the select list object. Afterwards, the call can be retried and it seems to work pretty well.