Read more

Test whether a form field exists with Cucumber and Capybara

Henning Koch
February 03, 2012Software engineer at makandra GmbH

The step definition below lets you say:

 Then I should see a field "Password"
 But I should not see a field "Role"
Illustration book lover

Growing Rails Applications in Practice

Check out our e-book. Learn to structure large Ruby on Rails codebases with the tools you already know and love.

  • Introduce design conventions for controllers and user-facing models
  • Create a system for growth
  • Build applications to last
Read more Show archive.org snapshot

Here is the step definition:

Then /^I should( not)? see a field "([^"]*)"$/ do |negate, name|
  expectation = negate ? :should_not : :should
  begin
    field = find_field(name)
  rescue Capybara::ElementNotFound
    # In Capybara 0.4+ #find_field raises an error instead of returning nil
  end
  field.send(expectation, be_present)
end

Note that you might have to adapt the step definition for older Capybaras. Unfortunately the Capybara API wasn't very stable over time.

Posted by Henning Koch to makandra dev (2012-02-03 13:37)