I've preached tons on my blog about using the XMLDOM on webpages rather than the tools installed in QTP. I still feel this is much more reliable most of the time, since it allows you to incorporate more powerful, adaptive logic into you scripts. Who cares, for example, if the dev changes the structure or formatting of a page if you can write code that anticipates it?
However, sometimes, in pages that are more or less unlikely to be changed, you can get away with a shortcut. For example, I have a set of tabs buried in a very deep table structure. As I've posted before, QTP seems to handle embedded items like this very poorly. However, it seems to do a great job of identifying the tables themselves. For example, I have a nightmarish page with tons of embedded tables, and an iframe wrapping up legacy page stuff. See the pic:
Now, if you add the WebElement, QTP will likely not have any clue what you are talking about (largely since it's identified as WebElement, vs. whatever you want to interact with).
But...if I clickon the WebTable above and add it to the Object Repository (let's assume I named it “TabSelect1”...which I did), you can do this:
Dim objElements
Dim objElement
Set obj Elements = Browser(”X”).Page(”X”).Frame(”X”).WebTable(”TabSelect1”).Object.GetElementsByTagName()
For Each objElement in objElements
'Find the correct element via innertext or whatever and do stuff
'Cleanup code removed for brevity
Next 'objElement
So, rather than have to negotiate the whole XMLDOM, I can get at the portion I need *very* quickly. If the page changes, simply change the object in the OR.