I am using watir web driver for web scraping, where I fill the form and get the results. The results also includes the dropdown list, from where I have to extracted the currently selected text. I have used following queries.
selectedList = browser.select_list(:id => "itemType")
From this i can use following query:
selectedText = selectedList.selected_options.map(&:text)[0]
Using this query, I am able to get the selected text. But the problem is, the drop-down list contains thousands of options, and watir is taking too long to find the selected option using this query.
Any faster method is appreciated. Also I have tried with following queries:
selected = selectedList.selected_options()[0]
selectedText = selected.text
But the problem is same. I have other dropdowns with smaller options, where both of these queries are performing good, but with thousands of options, its really slow.
The problem is that to get the selected options, a call to the browser is made for each individual option. Even if each call takes a fraction of a second, it adds up quite quickly.
You could get the selected options in a single wire call by using execute_script:
selected_list = browser.select_list(id: 'itemType')
selected_options = browser.execute_script("return arguments[0].selectedOptions;", selected_list)
selected_text = selected_options.map(&:text)
For a page with just a 1000 option select list, this dropped the execution time from 64 seconds to only 0.2 seconds.
The above works for both dropdowns and multi-selects. If you know it is a dropdown (ie single selected option), you could get even faster by just returning the text (rather than the collection of selected options):
selected_list = browser.select_list(id: 'itemType')
selected_text = browser.execute_script("return arguments[0].selectedOptions[0].text;", selected_list)
This cut the time in half to 0.08 seconds. However, for such a small gain, I personally prefer the first approach as it minimizes the JavaScript code.