Both these approaches will keep your GET parameters -- and will only work for GET requests.

• Capybara:

  When /^I reload the page$/ do
    visit [ current_path, page.driver.request.env['QUERY_STRING'] ].reject(&:blank?).join('?')
  end
  

• Webrat:

  When /^I reload the page$/ do
    visit url_for(request.params)
  end
  

For a step that distinguishes between drivers (Selenium, Rack::Test, Culerity), check [n4k3d.com](http://n4k3d.com/blog/2011/02/02/reloading-the-page-in-cucumber-with-capybara-and-seleniu...

jquery-placeholder is a simple jQuery plugin that enables form placeholders in browsers that do not support them natively, i.e. IE < 10.

Properties

• Works in IE6.
• Automatically checks whether the browser natively supports the HTML5 placeholder attribute for input and textarea elements. If this is the case, the plugin won’t do anything. If @placeholder is only supported for input elements, the plugin will leave those alone and apply to textareas exclusively. (This is the case for Safari 4, Opera 11.00, and possibly other browsers.)
  ...

Using VCR to record communication with remote APIs is a great way to stub requests in tests. However, you may still want to look at the request data like the payload your application sent.

Using WebMock, this is simple: Make your request (which will record/play a VCR cassette), then ask WebMock about it:

expect(WebMock).to have_requested(:post, 'http://example.com').with(body: 'yolo')

Easy peasy.

Related cards

• Faking and testing the network with WebMock

If you need Google Chrome to run in English, and your system locale is a non-English one, you have two options:

• Switch your system to an English locale
• Head over to /opt/google/chrome/locales/ and remove any .pak files except those starting with “en”. They reappear when Chrome gets updated.

This may help you running your Selenium tests using the Chrome driver on applications that choose the language from what the browser sends as preferred language (which Chrome guesses from your system locale).

These steps are now part of Spreewald.

Since Capybara 0.4.1 a within scope will only look at the first element that matches. We find this behavior to be impractical, but it is by design.

In order to perform a test or action in all matching elements, do not use within but prefer the attached "inside any" Cucumber steps like these:

When I follow "Foo" inside any "table"
Then I should see "Bar" inside any "li"

Sometimes the order in which strings appear on a page matters to you.

Spreewald gives you steps like these:

Then I should see in this order:
  | Alpha Group |
  | Augsburg    |
  | Berlin      |
  | Beta Group  |

Or, if you prefer multiline strings:

Then I should see in this order:
  """
  Alpha Group
  Augsburg
  Berlin
  Beta Group
  """

The step ignores all HTML tags and only tests on plain text.

This cucumber step is useful for testing an image (looking at the src of the image).

Then(/^I should see the image "([^"]*)"$/) do |filename_with_extension|
  expect(page).to have_css("img[src*='#{filename_with_extension}']")
end

Then I should see the image "placeholder.png"

Outline: Read more about how to test a uploaded file here, e.g. file downloads.

Rails doesn't know which host it is running on. For generating links, it strips the hostname off the request URL, which can lead to errors when you have absolute URLs in your Cucumber tests.

If you really need to use absolute URLs somewhere, say in an email you send, either throw away the host when parsing it (e.g. body.scan(/http:\/\/[^\/]+\/([^\s"<]+)/)) or tell Webrat you're back on your site.

Simply give the select helper an option :disabled, passing either a single value or an array. You need to specify the option's value, not its text.

= form.select :country, Address.countries_for_select, :include_blank => true, :disabled => ['disabled-value1', 'disabled-value-2']

Also see Cucumber: Check if a select field contains a disabled option on how to test this.

Geordi 0.16+ supports running selenium tests with project-specific firefox versions.

Just update the gem. It will still default to using the old 5.0.1 firefox. If you want another one, add a file .firefox-version to your project, containing your preferred version.

geordi cucumber will prompt (and guide) you to install the given version. You can delete any old installation sitting in /opt/firefox-for-selenium if you have one.

We built cucumber_spinner to have a progress bar for Cucumber features, which also outputs failing scenarios as soon as they fail.

Installation

gem install cucumber_spinner

Usage

cucumber --format CucumberSpinner::ProgressBarFormatter

If you use CucumberSpinner::CuriousProgressBarFormatter and a feature fails, the according page will show up in your browser.

Note that if you run your Cucumber tests using the [cuc](https://makandracards.com/makandra/1277-a-nicer-way-to-...

In order to cover some edge cases you rarely care about, Range#include? will become very slow in Ruby 1.9:

Range#include? behaviour has changed in ruby 1.9 for non-numeric ranges. Rather than a greater-than/less-than check against the min and max values, the range is iterated over from min until the test value is found (or max) [...] Ruby 1.9 introduces a new method Range#cover? that implements the old include? behaviour, however this method isn’t available in 1.8.7.

The attached ...

• 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...

In order to go back one page in your Cucumber tests, you can use the following step definition for Capybara:

When(/^I go back$/) do
  visit page.driver.request.env['HTTP_REFERER']
end

If you're on Webrat, this should work:

When(/^I go back$/) do
  visit request.env["HTTP_REFERER"])
end

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

When you use google analytics to track your visitors interactions, you should ensure that it runs on your production site only. Otherwise it will spoil your statistics. To prevent this, test for the right environment and place the JS-code afterwards:

- if Rails.env.production?
  :javascript
    var _gaq = _gaq || [];
    _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXXX-X']);
    _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
    ...

Running projects parallel makes some trouble with PDF generation. Use geordi rspec spec to force sequential tests for the whole application or failed specs only.

geordi rspec

RTeX::Document::GenerationError in '...'
Could not find result PDF document.pdf after generation.
Check .../document.log

The document will show you, that RTeX tries to generate a PDF document out of a HTML file, which won't work.

Great presentation about writing Javascript like you write everything else: Well-structured and tested.

JavaScript is no longer a toy language. Many of our applications can’t function without it. If we are going to use JavaScript to do real things, we need to treat it like a real language, adopting the same practices we use with real languages.

This framework agnostic talk takes a serious look at how we develop JavaScript applications. Despite its prototypical nature, good object-oriented programming principles are still relevant. The...

The translation method translate and its alias t have bang brothers: translate! and t!. They will raise I18n::MissingTranslationData on a missing translation instead of printing a string like translation missing: de.custom.failure.

To turn on raising globally, you need to replace the default exception handler. The attached initializer makes I18n just raise any exception (in a development or test environment).

Using Scenic, you can bring the power of SQL views to your Rails application without having to switch your schema format to SQL. Scenic provides a convention for versioning views that keeps your migration history consistent and reversible and avoids having to duplicate SQL strings across migrations. As an added bonus, you define the structure of your view in a SQL file, meaning you get full SQL syntax highlighting in the editor of your choice and can easily test your SQL in the database console during development.

[https://robots.thoughtb...

A while ago we were working on an application that had an entire version specially created for mobiles, such as the iPhone. This specific application was entirely tested with Capybara, Steak and Selenium Webdriver. Although the test suite wasn’t the fastest one in the world, the web application was very well tested, and to guarantee that we would also be testing the mobile version, we would have to simulate an iPhone user agent accessing the application.

But wait, you might be thinking that we are not able to change browser headers while ...