Opening new tabs in Chrome using Watir causes problems using open tabs - google-chrome

Question

Short version: new tabs in Chrome prevent old tabs from being used, fixing that means that opened tabs with PDFs in them get reused before a human can examine the PDFs.
Long version:
Originally it worked like this:
open new Chrome window to main page of the app (tab #1)
2.[do process A and then] click the button and a new tab (tab #2) opens with PDF A in it.
Go back to tab #1 [do process B and then] click the button and a new tab (tab #3) opens with PDF B in it.
Go back to tab #1 [do process C and then] click the button and a new tab (tab #4) opens and Word document C document gets downloaded.
Go back to tab #1 [do process D and then] click the button and a new tab (tab #5) opens and Word document D document gets downloaded.
All tabs stay open and PDFs can be viewed. Not perfect, but workable.
But then things changed. I pulled frequently used stuff out, put them in methods in another file so all of the various tests could use them, which seemed like a good idea. But that seems to have caused problems with losing focus on the original window. (I may be wrong) now I'm stuck with:
open new Chrome window to main page of the app (tab #1)
[do process A and then] click the button and a new tab (tab #2) opens with PDF A in it.
Stay in tab #2 [do process B and then] click the button and a new tab (tab #3) opens with PDF B in it. PDF A is now lost
Stay in tab #3 [do process C and then] click the button and a new tab (tab #4) opens and Word document C document gets downloaded. PDF B is now lost
Stay in tab #4 [do process D and then] click the button and a new tab (tab #5) opens and Word document D document gets downloaded.
This was caused by using "b.windows.last.use"
So I tried using "b.windows.first.use"
But that fails, because focus isn't going back to tab #1, and watir can't find the object in the modal that it needs to click.
(in `assert_ok': Element is not clickable at point (737.5, -373) (Selenium::WebDriver::Error::UnknownError))
So far as I can tell, I would be fine if I could do any one of the following
get PDFs to download. I cannot. This page seemed promising, but the code didn't work and I couldn't fix it.
get watir to go back to the first page, "for realsies", and find the buttons it needs
perhaps open a new tab for every section of the test (I'm going to look into this one, but I'm not overly hopeful)
Any ideas?
I updated Watir and Ruby both within the last two months. I'm using Chrome on OSX. Moving to Windows or IE are not viable options.
Here is a section of the code. No, I'm not a programmer first and foremost.
Thanks.
currenturl = "stackoverflow.placeholder.com/works"
# print Inventory Report .PDF (document 1)
b.goto currenturl
b.div(:id, 'page').a(:text, 'Inventory Report').click
sleep 1
b.div(:id, 'printInventoryReportModal').a(:text, 'A4').click
b.link(:id => "submitBTNprint-inventory-report").fire_event "onclick"
# print General List .PDF (document 2)
b.goto [main page URL]
b.div(:id, 'page').a(:text, 'General List').click
sleep 1
b.div(:id, 'printGeneralInventoryListModal').a(:text, 'A4').click
b.link(:id => "submitBTNprint-general-list").fire_event "onclick"
# print General List .DOC (document 3)
b.goto [main page URL]
b.div(:id, 'page').a(:text, 'General List').click
sleep 1
b.div(:id, 'printGeneralInventoryListModal').a(:text, '.DOC').click
b.div(:id, 'printGeneralInventoryListModal').a(:text, 'A4').click
b.link(:id => "submitBTNprint-general-list").fire_event "onclick"

Answer 1

It seems mostly that the browser.window function is not working the way you expect, or you are not using it properly. Since your question currently contains very little in terms of examples of how you are trying to change windows (tabs) it's very difficult to tell what you might be doing wrong.
To start with I would use IRB to do some exploring and troubleshooting
Get into IRB, then use
require 'watir-webdriver'
b = Watir::Browser.new :chrome
Now manually navigate the browser window that opens and get it into the state where you have multiple tabs open
Now try something like this in IRB to see if you can get it to spit out window titles
b.windows.each {|window| puts window.title}
If the titles are different, then you should be able to use that to set which window you want to use. If they are not different you will need to look at other attributes to see if there is an easy way to identify which window you want. (or maybe just use :index)

Answer 2

Try below code,
sleep (2)
#browser.driver.switch_to.window(#browser.driver.window_handles[put_your_index])
#browser.window(:title,"Please put your title here").use do
end
#browser.button.when_present.click
when you want to want to switch back to your actual window, use the
same code as above and change the window index accordingly.
For an example, if parent window index is 0 and then child window index would be 1