Enhancing Text Selection and Relational Selectors with Optional Parameters

In the past, you had to write text().withText(<your text>) for text selection. This was tedious to write and additionally hard to read, too.

Now, we've implemented optional parameters, allowing you to simply use text(<your text here>) with your preferred parameter. This makes it easier to select text and improves readability.

And before introducing optional parameters for relational selectors like above(), below(), leftOf(), and rightOf(), you could only select the first element. Making it impossible to automate things where you wanted to target the nth-element.

You can now add an index, which starts at zero, to select other elements more conveniently like this

await au.click().text().below(2).textfield().exec()

In this blog post we show you how you can use the optional parameters to improve your automations 🥳

Optional Parameters for `text()`

Targeting a text-element before optional parameters was done like this:

await aui.moveMouseTo()
         .text()
         .withText('UNIQUE')
         .exec();

This is unpleasant to write and also to read. Now you can shorten it by leaving out the withText() and supply your text directly to text() like this:

await aui.moveMouseTo()
         .text('UNIQUE')
         .exec();

Optional Parameters for Relational Selectors

Let us start with an example first. How would you select the text WOOHOO when you can only target the text FIRST reliably?

//      UNIQUE
        
//      FIRST                SECOND                  WOOHOO

//      THIRD

Exactly. You would have to rely on SECOND which may clutter your code and blur your intentions like this!

await aui.moveMouseTo().text().rightOf().text('SECOND).exec();

But you can now use an index for relational selectors like above(): For the first element, input nothing or zero; for the second, input one; for the third, input two, and so on.

This enables you to select the second element right of FIRST with ease.

await aui.moveMouseTo()
         .text()
         .rightOf(1)
         .text('FIRST').exec();

Conclusion

With the new optional parameter for `text()` we simplified the targeting of text elements.

With the optional index-Parameter for relational selectors like above() it is now possible to select the nth-element and target elements in your AskUI automations that were hard to target before.

Also check out the docs:

• text()
• Relational Selector above()