Can a watir browser object be re-used in a later Ruby process?

Question

So let\'s say pretty often a script runs that opens a browser and does web things:

require \'watir-webdriver\'

$browser = Watir::Browser.new(:firefox, :prof         


        

Answer 1

Just an update on part 2 of my question.

It seems one CAN serialize a Watir:Browser object with YAML, and because it's text-based the contents were quite interesting to me (e.g. some things I've only dreamed of tweaking hidden inside private elements of private classes...but that's a separate topic)

Deserializing from YAML is still trouble. While I haven't tested beyond the first try it gives me some kind of reg exp parse error...not sure what that's about.

(more on that at at how to serialize an object using TCPServer inside? )

Meanwhile, even attempting to serialize with Marshal, which is also built-in to Ruby but stores in binary format, results in a very reasonable-sounding error about not being able to dump a TCPServer object (apparently contained within my Watir:Browser pointed to by $browser)

All in all I'm not surprised at these results, but still pretty confident there is a way, until Watir arrives at something more native (like PersistentWebdriver or how it used to be in the days of jssh when you could simply attach to an already running browser with the right extension)

Until then, if serialization + deserialization to a working object gets too thorny I'll resort to daemonizing a portion of my Ruby to keep objects persistent and spare the frequent and costly setup/teardowns. And I did take a gander at some established (unit testing) frameworks but none seem to fit well yet within my overall software structure--I'm not web testing after all.