watir-webdriver setting value to text_field very slow

Question

It takes around 4-5 seconds to set large text to text_field using watir-webdriver. I have also tried value method, but still it's very slow.

I have found a workaround for this on Windows using Clipboard gem and send_keys [:control, "v"], however this does not really work with headless linux. Any suggestion on this?

Answer 1

Inputting large values can be slow because the characters are inputted one at a time. This is to trigger each of the key events.

Assuming your application does not care about the events triggered by inputting the field, you could directly set the value via JavaScript.

Watir 6.8+

Watir now provides a #set! method to do this:

long_text = "abcde fghijk lmnop qrstuv"
browser.text_field.set!(long_text)

Pre-Watir 6.8

Prior to v6.8 (when this was originally answered), this needed to be done manually via #execute_script:

long_text = "abcde fghijk lmnop qrstuv"
the_field = browser.text_field
p the_field.value
#=> ""
browser.execute_script("arguments[0].value = '#{long_text}';", the_field)
p the_field.value
#=> "abcde fghijk lmnop qrstuv"

Performance Comparison

Even with this small text, you can see that execute_script is much faster. A benchmark:

n = 100
Benchmark.bm do |x|
  x.report("execute_script:") { n.times { browser.execute_script("arguments[0].value = '#{long_text}';", the_field) } }
  x.report("set:") { n.times { the_field.set(long_text) } }
end

The results:

                     user     system      total        real 
execute_script:  0.874000   0.609000   1.483000 (  6.690669) 
set:             2.199000   1.295000   3.494000 ( 22.384238)