How to click on an AutoCompleteExtender with Watin

Question

For my acceptance testing I'm writing text into the auto complete extender and I need to click on the populated list.

In order to populate the list I have to use AppendText instead of TypeText, otherwise the textbox looses focus before the list is populated.

Now my problem is when I try to click on the populated list. I've tried searching the UL element and clicking on it; but it's not firing the click event on the list.

Then I tried to search the list by tagname and value:

Element element = Browser.Element(Find.By("tagname", "li") && Find.ByValue("lookupString"));

but it's not finding it, has anyone been able to do what I'm trying to do?

Answer 1

In case someone has the same problem. It works with the next code:

string lookupString = "string in list";
Regex lookup = new Regex(string.Format(".*{0}.*", lookupString));
Element list = Browser.Element("li", Find.ByText(lookup));
list.MouseDown();

Answer 2

The shorter version of that is:

string lookupString = "string in list";
Element list = Browser.Element("li", Find.ByText(new Regex(lookupString)));
list.MouseDown();

Regexs will do a partial match so you don't need to specify .* either side and use string.Format. This assumes however that the lookupString doesn't contain any characters special to Regexs, they'd need to be escaped.