Element finding is a central feature of Capybara. Since #find is normally used to get elements from the current page and interact with them, it's a good thing that some Capybara drivers (e.g. Selenium) will wait an amount of time until the expected element shows up. But if Capybara cannot #find it at all, you'll get an error.
if page.find('.that-element')
# Do something
else
# Never happens because #find raises
end
In order to simply check whether an element is present, without errors raised, you can use #has_css?. It will return a Boolean – but will wait as well. If the element does not exist, it will take the configured Capybara.default_wait_time for this check to return false, which is usually several seconds.
The solution is to disable the waiting for just that check:
if page.has_css?('.that-element', wait: 0)
# Do something
else
# Do something else
end
Important
If you opt-out of Capybara's retry mechanism you need to retry yourself or your test will be flaky.
Note the wait: 0 argument. Actually there is
a host of options
Show archive.org snapshot
worth knowing (scroll down to the "Options Hash" section).
