323938 - xpath support for anonymous nodes

Status: NEW

(Core :: XSLT, defect)

Description

[Shane Caraveo]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

currently you cannot evaluate an xpath on a xul dom if it travels into a xbl element.

<binding>
<content>
   <label ...>
</content>
</binding>

xpath: //....../mybinding/label

The result is empty, no exceptions occure.

A simple repro is to try and xpath into the html:input of a xul:textbox, which ends up something like:  //xul:textbox/xul:hbox/xul:hbox/html:input

I'm trying to build a DOM Event recorder/playback system for developing a test infrastructure for Komodo.  This would be similar to selenium, except that it is focused on use with xul applications, and not websites.  I have a working record/playback already, except the failure case when I run into xbl components (most situations).


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Shane Caraveo]

Perhaps a clearer example would be good.  Given a xul window:

<window
    xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"
    xmlns:html="http://www.w3c.org/1999/xhtml"
>
    <textbox id="test"/>
</window>

you cannot use an xpath that digs into the anonymous nodes inside the textbox:

//xmlns:textbox/xmlns:hbox/xmlns:hbox/html:input

of secondary issue is that you must use "xmlns" in that xpath, slightly anoying but easy to deal with.

Comment 2

[Shane Caraveo]

Attachment: recorder.xul

xul dialog for recorder/playback

Comment 3

[Shane Caraveo]

Attachment: recorder.js for dialog

Comment 4

[Shane Caraveo]

I've added some of the stuff I'm playing with in making a recorder/playback.  You can open teh xul dialog from any window, and click the start button.  This will focus teh opener window, and start recording events.  When done, click stop, then click playback.  you'll see some debug output in the console.

The playback works in some area's, such as clicking on tabs that are in the xul document.  Probably not the tabs in the tabbrowser.  Fails in most area's due to anonymous nodes.

Comment 5

[Jonas Sicking (:sicking) No longer reading bugmail consistently]

So I think we should do this using an extension function that returns a nodeset containing both the anonymous children and the explicit children for a node.

Something like

tx:xblChildren(xul:textbox)/xul:hbox/xul:hbox/html:input

It is sort of cumbersome to have to use this syntax, but it's the best that the XPath1 syntax allows.

Another issue is how the .. operator will work in the context of anonymous content. Ideally I think that that operator should walk from an anonymous child to the bound parent. This is very easy to do in xbl1, but might be a bit more tricky in xbl2, but we'll solve that problem when we get there.

Comment 6

[Jonas Sicking (:sicking) No longer reading bugmail consistently]

The first question though is, what namespace should we use for mozilla extension functions?

Comment 7

[Alex Vincent [:WeirdAl]]

Shane, is this a dupe of bug 326745?