Ruby and Watir: Sending keyboard events to an element

Ok, so you need to send certain keyboard events to an element to properly test a webpage, but stuck how to do it?

Ive looked at some tutorials on the web, but there doesn't seem a simple solution.

However, I have been experimenting, and this method seems to work fine.

First off create your Watir::IE object

ie = Watir::IE.new

Then navigate to the page you are testing

ie.goto("mypage.myserver.com")

Grab the descriptor of the element you wish to send a keyboard command to (for example, a text field)

element = ie.textField(:id, "myText")

Now, I found that keyboard events only work if the Watir::IE window is on top and has focus, so for example if we wish to send a "Pageup" keyboard command to the element "myText" we would do so by

ie.bring_to_front

element.focus

element.container.focus

element.container.send_keys("{PGUP}")

This method does require Autoit(http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/) to be installed, and a full list of keyboard events can be found here: http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/appendix/SendKeys.htm