Is there a way to slow down execution of Watir Webdriver under Cucumber?

Question

Is there any way we can slow down the execution of Watir WebDriver under Cucumber?

I would like to visually track the actions performed by Watir. At the moment, it g

Answer 1

While Watir itself does not have an API for slowing down the execution, you could use the underlying Selenium-WebDriver's AbstractEventListener to add pauses before/after certain types of actions.

Given you want to see the result of actions, you probably want to pause after changing values and clicking elements. This would be done by creating the following AbstractEventListener and passing it in when creating the browser:

class ActionListener < Selenium::WebDriver::Support::AbstractEventListener    
  def after_change_value_of(element, driver) 
    sleep(5)
  end

  def after_click(element, driver) 
    sleep(5)
  end
end

browser = Watir::Browser.new :firefox, :listener => ActionListener.new

For a full list of events that you can listen for, see the Selenium::WebDriver::Support::AbstractEventListener documentation.

Answer 2

Not universally. You could Monkey Patch the element_call method to add a sleep after every interaction with a Selenium Element. Import this code after requiring watir-webdriver.

module Watir
  class Element
    alias_method :watir_element_call, :element_call
    def element_call &block
      watir_element_call &block
      sleep 1
    end          
  end    
end

Also note, that Monkey Patching is generally a bad idea, and when I change the implementation (which I plan to), this code will break.