Make TableCell handle TH elements as well

Update 9/18/2009: The described solution described below no longer works as of WatiN 2.0 beta 1. See this blog post for the new way.

Original blog text:

Going through the WatiN bug tracker on SourceForge I came along this bug report:

"When you retrieve a Table Row that contains TH elements, the TableCells collection returns empty. The reason being TableCell only recognizes TD as a valid tagname, when it should recognize TH."

I agree that TH elements probably should be seen as a TableCell as well. I'm a bit reluctant though to fix this because this will change the behavior of WatiN possibly resulting in unexpected failing tests for users of WatiN. So I did a small experiment to see if you (as a user of the WatiN API) are able to make WatiN handle TH elements as a TableCell if you need it to.

First I created this HTML table for my test

 

Next I wrote and ran the following unit test and..... it passed!

The trick is in the line:

TableCell.ElementTags.Add(new ElementTag("th"));

This registers the TH element as an element that can be wrapped by the TableCell class.

I tested this against the current development code and it run just fine. It probably will work as well with the current 1.2.1 and 2.0 CTP releases.

Technorati Tags: WatiN