From: "joe.yakich@..." <joe.yakich@...>
Date: 2005-09-10T04:16:30+09:00
Subject: Dynamic method execution problem

All,

I have been trying to figure out a way to execute a series of methods,
only 1 of which is expected to actually run without exception, in a
particular order. I haven't figured out how to use send or Method#call,
so I was messing with eval, but not with much success (I have problems
with argument passing, calling the right method, and so on.)

I have been trying this, but it doesn't quite work. (As background
information, I'm using the Watir test library, and I want to interact
with a web page that may have 1 of 4 different elements, each of which
I have methods to access and use.)

# Each item in this array is a different method name (I changed the
names to
# "methodn" from more useful names for the purposes of this question)
methods = [
  "method1",
  "method2",
  "method3",
  "method4"
]

# The ie variable here refers to a Watir::IE object
begin
  my_method = methods.shift
  puts "Trying #{my_method}"
  eval "#{my_method}(ie)"
end

rescue UnknownObjectException
  if methods.length > 0
    retry
  else
    raise
  end

Any suggestions? I'm new to Ruby, so perhaps there's a totally
different approach that is the standard way to address this. (I was
trying stuff inspired from PickAxe 2nd Ed, pg.112 and pg.407-409).

Thanks in advance!

Joe