IE Automation with Windows PowerShell

Question

Hey all.

I want to ask about manipulating IE via Powershell. My goal is to write script that will automatically perform some actions in the browser (on the client side – navigate to page, perform actions, measure time between responses, etc.)

I have this little thing:

$ie = new-object -com "InternetExplorer.Application"
$ie.visible = $true
$ie.navigate("http://google.com")

Now I want to check whether the browser stopped page rendering (assuming, that google takes like 30 seconds to load). As I checked with $ie | get-member there is DocumentCompleted property (event), but I don’t know how to access/compare it. How should I do that?

Or maybe I should use .NET instead COM object and initiate $ie with [system.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser] ?

cheers

edit:
Well... $ie.busy works, but (what maybe I haven't made clear earlier) I want to know exact moment of the page rendering competition. Checking $ie.busy in infinite loop every second might work but I suppose it's not the best way to do that.

Let's say page is loading some time (rendering is long due to the gigantic scripts on client side). I would like how long does it take to:

1. load page
2. how long it will take to reload/re-render after changing some data and clicking 'Save'.

Answer 1

You can check .busy property.

edit:

Status property will also work here. However you can use tool like Firebug to see page load time.

Answer 2

If you do decide to go .NET instead of PowerShell, WatiN is great for this. It will give you tons of flexibility over the WebBrowser control and is a lot easier to use. You can also drive Firefox now in version 2.

Answer 3

Since it has an event, you could try out the PowerShell Eventing Library. It says that it supports COM events, though I haven't tried it.