Implement methods to allow for emulating scrolling of mouse wheel over an element

[Chuckv]

There are a number of jquery type controls that create a scrollbox of some sort. Great example is on this page http://rocha.la/jQuery-slimScroll. obviously normal scroll functions fail on these controls, which want to be driven by mouse scrolling, or dragging of their 'scrollbar'

emulating mouse wheel scrolling would be a good way to interact with such a control, but we don't currently have a way to do that. I suggest we consider

1. provide a 'scroll_mouse' or 'scroll_mouse_wheel' method that would accept a delta value (signed int) and fire off the appropriate event along with the delta parameter. Note this might be best because apparently not all browsers handle this the same way (see http://www.sitepoint.com/html5-javascript-mouse-wheel/ presuming it is still correct) so this would free the user from having to know what event to fire and what direction was indicated by positive/negative delta values

bit more background on why this is needed:
In terms of the example control, normal scroll functions don't work on these controls (no surprise there) and they only seem to respond to events. onmousescroll over the window, or dragging the scrollbar. The problem is that the first is not supported (we can't send a parameter indicating the wheel delta, because fire_event does not allow that) and the second is not always viable depending on the nature of the control.

If the control has the scrollbar always visible, then you can use drag operations on that element, but if the scroll control is set to appear/dissapear based on mouseover, it's flakey as hell and not reliable. firing mouseover events does not seem reliable, and in experimenting with this I've had the control just go hidden and stay that way (ugh). and if not visible, not draggable.

[Chuckv]

placed in this project as requested

[p0deje]

Thanks!

As I said, I am not sure when I can look into this, so patches are welcome!

[techsoulman]

I have the exact same need as Chuckv, I am dealing with a page that dynamically serves content to the page when a particular div is scrolled.

Have you had any luck working on this idea? Or has anyone discovered an alternative?

I'm am new to Watir and programming in general so sorry if anything I ask is noobish. Thanks!

[p0deje]

Do you mean when you scroll to div (like typical infinite scrolling implementation) or when you scroll within div.

[techsoulman]

It is within the div, it's an inner div with a scroll bar that dynamically updates it's content as you scroll it.

[p0deje]

If you can come with a test case (e.g. HTML + JS) which can be used to specify the desired behavior, I might try to find a solution. So far it's very vague to me.