Capybara 'fill_in': Ambiguous match for different input names
When you have two inputs, where one contains the name of the other (eg. Name
and Name with special treatment
), Capybara's fill_in
method will fail with the following message:
Ambiguous match, found 2 elements matching visible field "Name" that is not disabled (Capybara::Ambiguous)
You can force Capybara to match exactly what you are typing (which makes your tests better anyways) with match: :prefer_exact
:
name = 'Name'
value = 'Bettertest Cucumberbatch'
fill_in(field, with: value, match: :prefer_exact)
Furthermore...
Always convert and strip user-provided images to sRGB
Debugging image color profiles is hard. You can't trust your eyes in this matter, as the image rendering depends on multiple factors. At least the operation system, browser or image viewer software and monitor influence the resulting image colors on your screen.
When we offer our users the possibility to upload images, they will most likely contain tons of EXIF metadata and sometimes exotic color profiles like eciRGB. We want to get rid of the metadata, as it might contain sensitiv...
Jasmine: Test that an object is an instance of a given class
To test that an object was constructed by a given constructor function, use jasmine.any(Klass)
:
describe('plus()', function() {
it ('returns a number', function() {
let result = plus(1, 2)
expect(result).toEqual(jasmine.any(Number))
})
})
Defining new elements for your HTML document
Browsers come with a set of built-in elements like <p>
or <input>
. When we need a new component not covered by that, we often build it from <div>
and <span>
tags. An alternative is to introduce a new element, like <my-element>
.
When a browser encounters an unknown element like <my-element>
, the browser will proceed to render <my-element>
's children. The visual rendering of your page will not be affected.
If you care about their HTML being valid, your new element should contain a dash character (-
) to mark it as a *custom el...
How to set up SMTP email delivery with a Gmail account
If you want to make your Rails application be capable of sending SMTP emails, check out the action mailer configuration section in the Ruby on Rails guide.
TL;DR you will end up having an smtp_settings
hash that looks something like this:
smtp_settings = {
address: ...,
domain: ...,
port: ...,
user_name: ...,
password: ...,
authentication: ...,
tls: ...,
enable_starttls_auto: ...,
}
This hash can be set as the `delivery_me...
Rspec 3: what to do when `describe` is undefined
When tests might not run with skipping RSpec
in the RSpec.describe
failing with the error undefined method 'describe' for main:Object
this card will help you out!
In RSpec 3 the DSL like describe
is exposed globally by default. Therefore it is not necessary to write Rspec.describe
.
However, there is a config option to disable this beavior, which also disables the old should
-syntax:
RSpec.configure do |config|
config.disable_monkey_patching!...
Understanding grid sizes of (SVG) icons
A primer on vector graphics
For rastered image formats like JPG or PNG, each pixel is basically drawn on a fixed size canvas. To display such an image in a different size (say: 1.5 times larger than original), the renderer (your Browser / GPU / Monitor) needs to interpolate the color values of missing pixels. The image will appear slightly blurred.
This is different for vector graphics like the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format. You can imagine SVG files as XML file contai...
Resources for working with the Youtube API
You can use the Youtube API to get data from youtube. Here are some resources and some things that are good to know.
You need to create an API key and each request will cost a certain amount of Request-Points (depending on the kind of query).
It may help to understand youtube's domain model before starting.
It's best to just try out your requests in the browser to see what you will get.
A request can look like this (note that you have to replace the playlis...
Pattern: Disabling a certain feature in tests
There is a kind of features in web applications that hinder automated integration tests. Examples include cookie consent banners or form captchas. Clearly, these should be disabled so you do not have to explicitly deal with them in each and every test (like, every test starting with accepting the cookies notice). On the other hand, they must be tested as well.
A good feature disabling solution should therefore meet these requirements:
-
The feature is generally disabled in tests. A test does not need to do anything manually.
-
It is *...
ActiveSupport includes Timecop-like helpers
ActiveSupport (since 4.1) includes test helpers to manipulate time, just like the Timecop gem:
-
To freeze the current time, use
freeze_time
(ActiveSupport 5.2+):freeze_time
-
To travel to a specific moment in time, use
travel_to
:travel_to 1.hour.from_now
Important
When freezing time with
#travel_to
, time will be frozen (like withfreeze_time
). This means that your application can't detect passage of time by usingTime.now
. -
To travel a re...
Email validation regex
There is a practical short list for valid/invalid example email addresses - Thanks to Florian L.! The definition for valid emails (RFC 5322) can be unhandy for some reasons, though.
Since Ruby 2.3, Ruby's URI lib provides a built-in email regex URI::MailTo::EMAIL_REGEXP
. That's the best solution to work with.
/\A[a-zA-Z0-9.!\#$%&'*+\/=?^_`{|}~-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9](?:[...
Rails: Verify the CSRF token
Rails uses a CSRF token in forms and AJAX requests to verify a user request. Internally it compares the injected CSRF token of the form data with the CSRF token in the encrypted user session. To prevent SSL BREACH attacks, the CSRF token from the form data is masked.
To better debug issues, when these tokens do not match, it is useful to unmask the CSRF token from the form da...
Rails: Manually decrypting a session cookie
Normally, Rails handles encryption and signing of cookies, and you don't have to deal with the matter. Should you need to decrypt a session cookie manually: here is how.
Obviously, you can only decrypt a session cookie from within the corresponding Rails application. Only the Rails application that encrypted a cookie has the secrets to decrypt it.
Rails 7
- With authenticated encryption enabled (default since Rails 5)
- W...
Links to CoffeeScript 1 documentation
coffeescript.org contains only documentation for the latest CoffeeScript version. Version 2 transpiles to ES6.
We stopped using CoffeeScript a while ago, but older projects still use version 1 which transpiles to ES5. This means that examples for transpiled results or the "Try CoffeeScript" web console behave differently, and lookup up stuff when working on older projects may be somewhat hard.
Here are some links to version 1 documentation:
-
http://coffeescript.org/v1/
- Fully functional
- If this ever g...
WProofreader: How to manually enable for a WYSIWYG editor instance (with CKeditor 4 example)
WProofreader is a spelling and grammar checking tool that integrates with textareas and numerous WYSIWYG editors.
While it usually activates automatically, depending on your application, it may fail to boot.
In my case, an application was using CKEditor 4 and programmatically activated CKEditor. WProofreader's autoSearch
logic failed to hook into that for some reason.
You can choose not to use its autoSearch
feature, but explicitly enable WProofreader.
Here is a guide for CKEditor 4. It should apply to other WYSIWYG editors as well.
1...
A collection of useful design resources for developers
This collection contains some useful design resources for developers. Many of them were mentioned in the Refactoring UI tutorials.
Tutorials
Integrating or upgrading makandra-rubocop
Introduction
Most of the time it is a tedious task to apply a code style guide to an existing code base as there are likely to be a lot of conflicts. At makandra we are using makandra-rubocop to have code style checks. Here is some advice on how to add makandra-rubocop efficiently.
Note
RubyMine by default has a Rubocop inspection with rules that we don't always agree with. We recommend replacing this with makandra-rubocop or disabling the inspection.
...
How to enable Chromedriver logging
When using Chrome for Selenium tests, the chromedriver
binary will be used to control Chrome. To debug problems that stem from Selenium's Chrome and/or Chromedriver, you might want to enable logging for the chromedriver itself. Here is how.
Option 1: Use Selenium::WebDriver::Service
In your test setup, you may already have something like Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new(@app, browser: :chrome, options: ...)
, especially when passing options like device emulation.
Similar to options
, simply add an extra key service
and pass an inst...
A community-curated list of flexbox issues and cross-browser workarounds for them
This repository is a community-curated list of flexbox issues and cross-browser workarounds for them. The goal is that if you're building a website using flexbox and something isn't working as you'd expect, you can find the solution here.
As the spec continues to evolve and vendors nail down their implementations, this repo will be updated with newly discovered issues and remove old issues as they're fixed or become obsolete. If you discover a bug that's not listed here, please report it so everyone else can benefit.
Bash script to list commits by Pivotal Tracker ID
The main benefit of our convention to prefix commits by their corresponding Pivotal Tracker ID is that we can easily detect commits that belong to the same story. You can either do that manually or use the bash script below by copying it somewhere to your .bashrc
.
# Usage: ptcommits 123456
function ptcommits {
if test "$1"
then
local PTID=$(echo "$1" | grep "[0-9]*" -o) # Allow URLs
git log --onel...
Using CSS transitions
CSS transitions are a simple animation framework that is built right into browsers. No need for Javascript here. They're supported by all browsers.
Basic usage
Transitions are used to animate the path between to property values. For example, to let the text color fade from red to green on hover, the following SASS is used (shorthand syntax):
.element
color: red
transition: color .1s
&:hover
color: green
This tells the browser "whenever the color
of an .element
changes...
Joining PDFs with Linux command line
There are several ways to merge two (or more) PDF files to a single file using the Linux command line.
If you're looking for graphical tools to edit or annotate a PDF, we have a separate card for that.
PDFtk (recommended)
PDFtk is a great toolkit for manipulating PDF documents. You may need to install it first (sudo apt install pdftk
).
Merging multiple files works like this:
pdftk one.pdf two.pdf cat output out.pdf
Unlike pdfjam, PDFtk should not mess with page sizes but simply joins pages as they are.
...
IE11 ignores calc() functions in the flex shorthand
Example (broken in IE):
flex: 0 1 calc(50% - 20px)
Workaround:
flex-basis: calc(50% - 20px)
flex-grow: 0 // Default, can be omitted for this example
flex-shrink: 1 // Default, can be omitted for this example
Rails: Do not load frameworks you don't need
Rails is split into a large number of (sub-) frameworks.
The most important and central of those are
- activesupport (extends the Ruby standard library)
- activerecord / activemodel (ORM for Rails)
- actionview / actionpack (controller / views)
- actionmailer (sends mails)
However, there are also some more situational frameworks included, such as
- actioncable (real time communications using websockets)
- actionmailbox (receives mails)
- actiontext (support for WYSIWYG text editor)
- activejob (background jobs)
- activestorage (file uplo...