• The step we used in the past (Then "foo" should not be visibile) doesn't reliably work in Selenium features.
• I overhauled the entire step so it uses Javascript to detect visibility in Selenium.
• The step has support for jQuery and Prototype projects, so it should be a drop-in replacement for all your projects.
• For Rack::Test the step no longer uses XPath so you should be able to understand it when you are not a cyborg :)
• There were some other cards detailing alternative steps to detect visibility. I deleted all these other cards s...

I highly recommend that you make use of RubyMine's feature to pin tabs.

When you pin all "important" files, you can follow method definitions, wildly open files from search results and have a ton of open tabs -- without the problem of finding the stuff you were working on before.

Guide

1. Pin the tabs of files that are currently in the focus of your work (important models, specs, etc):
   • Right-click a tab and select "Pin tab"
   • Or use a shortcut (see below)
2. Work as usual.
3. Once you opened other tabs because you searched ...

The step definition below lets you write:

When I click on "Foo"

This is useful in Selenium features where the element you click on is not necessarily a link or button, but could be any HTML element with a Javascript event binding.

The easiest way to get this step is to use Spreewald. If you would like to add it manually, here is the step definition:

When /^I click on "([^\"]+)"$/ do |text|
  matcher = ['*', { :text => text }]
  element = page.find(:css, *matcher)
  while be...

Your account profile now links to a personal RSS feed. This RSS feed contains the newest public and private cards for all your decks.

Makandra cards will auto-detect the language used for syntax highlighting.

This auto-detection sometimes fails for short code snippets. In such cases you can explicitly declare the language for Github-style code blocks:

```css
body {
  font-size: 12px
}
```

Will turn into this:

body {
  font-size: 12px
}

To disable syntax highlighting entirely use the text language:

```text
I am nothing without pretend

...

When refactoring a sequence of steps to a new, more descriptive step, you can use the steps method and Ruby's %-notation like this:

Given 'I have an article in my cart' do
  steps %(
    When I go the article list
    And I open the first article
    And I press "Add to cart"
  )
end

This way you can simply copy the steps over without any changes.

Warning: Apparently, steps processes its argument with the Gherkin parse...

Applications often show or hide elements based on viewport dimensions, or may have components that behave differently (like mobile vs desktop navigation menus).
Since you want your integration tests to behave consistently, you want to set a specific size for your tests' browser windows.

Using WebDriver options / Chrome device metrics

For Google Chrome, the preferred way is setting "device metrics". This allows you to configure dimensions larger than your display and enable/disable touch behavior.

Simply use register_driver to set up...

If you use rails_admin, your specs pass with the rspec binary, but not using rake spec (or rake parallel:spec etc), put this at the top of your spec_helper:

ENV['SKIP_RAILS_ADMIN_INITIALIZER'] = 'false'

Don't ask.

This is probably also true for cucumber, your env.rb would be the right place.

ActiveSupport::Memoizable will be removed from Rails and has a lot of strange caveats that will ruin your day.

Use the Memoizer gem instead. It works in all past and future Railses and has none of the annoying "features" of ActiveSupport::Memoizable. It just does memoization and does it well.

The syntax is similiar also:

class Foo
  include M...

In a nutshell: Capybara's find will not work properly on nodes from a list. Don't find on elements from a list.

Background

Consider this HTML:

<div class="message">
  <h2>Hello World</h2>
  Lorem ipsum...
</div>
<div class="message">
  <h2>Hello Universe</h2>
  Lorem ipsum...
</div>

Now let's say you obtain a list of all such message containers as an array:

messages = page.all('.message')

And then you look at their titles like this:

messages[0].find('h2').text
=> "Hello W...

Note that this seems to affect only recent Rails 2 versions.

You will not encounter this until you are writing to the cookie more than once, but when doing so, integration tests (Cucumber) may break for you with this error:

You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
You might have expected an instance of ActiveRecord::Base.
The error occurred while evaluating nil.[] (NoMethodError)

Background

The regular/short cucumber backtrace is not of any help but looking at the full trace reveals that ActionPack's `actio...

Last week saw a security issue with rails 2.3 that required a fix. While an official patch was provided, the 2.3 branch is no longer maintained. So we forked it.

(I'm sure there are already 100 other forks doing absolutely the same, but they are not very easily discoverable.)

To use our fork, change the gem "rails"... line in your Gemfile to this:

gem 'rails', :git => 'https://github.com/makandra/rails.git', :branch => '2-3-fixes'

The intent is to make as few changes to the f...

The problem

When using the asset pipeline your assets (images, javascripts, stylesheets, fonts) live in folders inside app:

app/assets/fonts
app/assets/images
app/assets/javascripts
app/assets/stylesheets

With the asset pipeline, you can use the full power of Ruby to generate assets. E.g. you can have ERB tags in your Javascript. Or you can have an ERB template which generates Haml which generates HTML. You can chain as many preprocessors as you want.

When you deploy, Rails runs assets:precompile...

If you are using VNC to run Selenium tests, it may be hard to see what's going on since by default there is no list of open windows and Alt+Tab won't work.

Solving that is easy:

1. Install a panel of your choice (like lxpanel) which offers task switching:

   sudo apt-get install lxpanel
   

   (You can't use gnome-panel because it won't start twice -- but lxpanel does a good job)

2. To have that panel appear on VNC screens by default, edit ~/.vnc/xstartup...

Quick introduction to git internals for people who are not scared by words like Directed Acyclic Graph.

The linked page offers a simple yet concise explanation of how git is organized internally ('a directed acyclic graph with post-it notes'). Each feature is illustrated by a simple diagram, so you get a sound understanding of how each command affects git's structure.

Geoffrey Grosenbach has created Gruff for easily plotting graphs. It is written in pure Ruby and integrates with Rails applications.

It provides features as automatic sizing of dots and lines (the more values, the thinner the graph's elements), custom or predefined themes, different styles (bar, line, dot and many more) and multiple graphs in one chart.

Installation

In your Gemfile:

gem 'rmagick', :require => false
gem 'gruff'

Then run bundle install (and don't forget to restart your development server.)

Usage

This i...

Sometimes you need a special version of chrome because it has some features you need for testing, like in this card. You do not need to use that Version apart from tests, because you can tweek selenium to use a special version that you set in your environment:

# features/support/chrome.rb
require "selenium/webdriver"

Capybara.register_driver :chrome320x480 do |app|
  
  if driver_path = ENV["CHROME_SELENIUM_BIN...

You can set the resolution and user agent used in selenium tests with chrome with the method described in this card, but you can also set the accept-language and other profile settings if you do this:

# features/support/chrome.rb
require "selenium/webdriver"


Capybara.register_driver :chrome320x480 do |app|
  args = []
  args << "--window-...

When you want to test how an web-application reacts in a specific resolution, you can set up a specific Selenium driver for some tests:

 Before('@chrome320x480') do
     Capybara.current_driver = :chrome320x480
 end

 After('@chrome320x480') do
    Capybara.use_default_driver 
 end

You can use either chromium or chrome beta (as of 2012.05 the Version "19.0.1084.41 beta" works), or any other member of the family. It only needs to supports the "--window-size" command-line switch. [See this list](http://peter.sh...

In order to navigate through the browser history. you can manipulate the window.history object via javascript like follows:

When /^I go back in the browser history$/ do
  page.evaluate_script('window.history.back()')
end 

For further functions of the window and history objects check out this link.

An improved version of this step is now part of our gem spreewald on Github.

Basic box shadow support is available in all browsers today, but you need to check to which extend they are supported. Implementations differ:

• Are multiple box shadows (separated by comma) possible?
• Are inset shadows possible?
• Can the spread radius be defined?
• Can you use it without vendor prefix?

A good compatibility chart can be found here. The gist is that, except for IE and some Safaris, you can use all features ...