Capybara will fail to find <a> tags that are missing an href attribute. This will probably happen to you every now and then on JavaScript-heavy applications.

An example would be an AngularJS application where the following HTML actually works. [1]

<a ng-click="hello()">Hello</a>

Capybara will fail to find that link, even though looking it up via the DOM shows it:

>> find_link("Hello")
Capybara::ElementNotFound: Unable to find link "Hello"

>> find("a").text
=> "Hello"

To make find_link and click_link work, ...

When your system is not running on English, you may sometimes want to run some applications and not use your system locale.
Use cases are scripts that parse output, or just using the (possibly) more common English labels or error messages. Here is how to do that.

I will use the date command and print the current weekday, just for the sake of an example.

Changing the locale using environment variables

Most often, setting LC_ALL for your command should be enough. The following was run on a system using a German locale.

$ date +%...

Though nowhere to be found in the official docs, this works just fine.

describe Facebook::Post do
  it_behaves_like :time_series
end

shared_examples_for :time_series do
  # shared example code
end

Getting rid of your old LibreOffice

Remove your old LibreOffice:

sudo apt-get remove libreoffice*

You probably also want to get rid of the dead PPAs you might have installed for LibreOffice 4.x:

• Open *Ubuntu Software Center
• Go to Edit / Software Source ... / Other Software
• Find and uncheck lines like http://ppa.launchpad.net/libreoffice/libreoffice-4-3/ubuntu. Note that you will probably have at least two lines pertaining to libreoffice.

Installing a new LibreOffice
-------------...

Let's say you have two screens:

1. Show a given project
2. Show a report for all projects

Ideally you want both screens to be handled by different controllers like this:

GET /projects/:id        => ProjectsController#show
GET /projects/report     => Projects::ReportsController#show

What seems like a simple requirement is a little awkward to configure in your routes.
Obviously the report should be a singleton resource, but how can we nest it into the Projects:: namespace?

What does not work is this:

resources :proj...

Sometimes you need complex expectations on method arguments like this

SomeApi.should_receive(:find).with(:query => '*foo*', :sort => 'timestamp ASC', :limit => 100).and_return(['some result'])

This is not very flexible, and failure messages will be hard to read.

Instead, consider doing this:

SomeApi.should_receive(:find) do |params|
  params[:query].should == '*foo*'
  params[:sort].should == 'timestamp ASC'
  params[:limit].should == 100
  
  ['some result']
end

What PDFKit is

• PDFKit converts a web page to a PDF document. It uses a Webkit engine under the hood.
• For you as a web developer this means you can keep using the technology you are familar with and don't need to learn LaTeX. All you need is a pretty print-stylesheet.

How to use it from your Rails application

• You can have PDFKit render a website by simply calling PDFKit.new('http://google.com').to_file('google.pdf'). You can then send the...

When using jQueryUI's Sortable plugin (either directly or via Angular's ui.sortable), you might struggle testing your nice drag&drop GUI since Selenium webdriver does not support native dragging events.

But jQueryUI uses jquery.simulate for their testing, so why shouldn't you? There is even an extension to it that makes testing drag & drop quite easy.

Here is what you need:

1. jquery.simulate.js
2. [`jquery.simula...

Nearly all jQuery traversal functions ignore elements that are not HTML tags.

To work with other type of nodes (like text, comment or CDATA sections) you need to:

• Retrieve child nodes contents() (which behaves like children() except that it returns all types of child nodes)
• Filter manually using either plain Javascript or jQuery's filter() method

Example

Let's write a function that takes a jQuery element and returns an array of all child nodes that are text nodes:

function selectTextNodes($container) {
  retu...

Microsoft Exchange service administrators can enable Exchange Web Services (EWS) which is a rather accessible XML API for interacting with Exchange. This allows you to read and send e-mails, create appointments, invite meeting attendees, track responses, manage to-do tasks, check user availability and all other sorts of things that are usually only accessible from Outlook.

You can implement an EWS by hand-rolling your XML (the [docs](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/...

Due to network or hardware failures, it can happen that one of your cronjobs will not run at the time you specify in the schedule. Your code should be built in a way that it can be re-run at a later time (when the failure is resolved).

For example, if you are synchronizing data with another service once every day, your cronjob should not only synchronize changes from the last 24 hours. If you do this and a network failure will delay the execution of your job by 5 hours, you will only synchronize changes from hour 6-29, but forget change...

TL;DR In blueprints, always wrap associations in blocks.

# Broken
Task.blueprint(:vacation) do
  project Project.make(:vacation)
  hours 8
  accounting_method 'none'
end

# Correct
Task.blueprint(:vacation) do
  project { Project.make(:vacation) }
  hours 8
  accounting_method 'none'
end

Without the block, Project.make will only run once when the blueprint is parsed (usually when RSpec is loaded), which is not what you want.

In Cucumber, scenario outlines help avoiding tests that are basically the same, except for a few variables (such as different inputs). So far, nothing new.

The problem

Now what if your test should (or should not) do something, like filling in a field only for some tests?

    Scenario Outline: ...
      When I open the form
        And I fill in "Name" with "<name>" # <= we want to do this only occasionally
      Then everybody should be happy
      
    Examples:
      | name  |
      | Alice |
      | Bob   |

You could o...

Previously the assets group existed to avoid unintended compilation-on-demand in production. As Rails 4 doesn't behave like that anymore, it made sense to remove the asset group.

While RSpec 1 and 2 decided that specs inside spec/model are model specs, and those inside spec/features are feature specs (and so on), RSpec 3 will no longer do that by default.

This will result in errors such as missing routing helpers, etc.

There are 2 ways to fix this:

• Explicitly set the type on each spec. For example:

  describe '...', type: 'feature' do
    # ...
  end
  

• Add this to your spec_helper.rb (inside the RSpec.configure block) to restore the old behavior:

  ...

When you don't only have a favicon.ico in your project but also PNGs of different sizes and backgrounds, you should test if all those files are actually reachable.

Here are a few selectors to get you started:

    'link[rel~="icon"]' # regular ones, matches "shortcut icon" and "icon"
    'link[rel="apple-touch-icon"]' # iOS
    'meta[content][name="msapplication-TileImage"]' # IE11
    'meta[content][name^="msapplication-square"]' # IE11

A s...

Spreewald 1.1.0 drops the be_true and be_false matchers in order to be RSpec 3 and Ruby 2 compatible. For backward compatibility, these matchers are replaced with == true and == false.

Note the slightly more changed semantics of the update.

Safari on iOS accepts an apple-touch-icon favicon that is used for stuff like desktop bookmarks. Always define a solid background color for them.

If you use PNGs with a transparent background, Safari will use just set a black background on your pretty icon. This is almost never what you want.
You can fix that by applying a white background via ImageMagick like this:

convert a...

Spreewald now has a spreewald binary that lists all available steps, optionally filtering them. Example:

$> spreewald

# All Spreewald steps
Given I am on ...
... long list

$> spreewald check

# All Spreewald steps containing 'check'
When I check "..."
When I uncheck "..."
Then the "..." checkbox( within ...)? should be checked
Then the "..." checkbox( within ...)? should not be checked
Then the radio button "..." should( not)? be (checked|selected)

The debugger gem does not seem to be properly working on Ruby 2. Use byebug instead!

Byebug is a simple to use, feature rich debugger for Ruby 2. It uses the new TracePoint API for execution control and the new Debug Inspector API for call stack navigation, so it doesn't depend on internal core sources. It's developed as a C extension, so it's fast. And it has a full test suite so it's reliable. Note that byebug works only for ruby 2.0.0 or newer. For...

The attached RSpec matcher allows for comfortably testing delegation.

Examples

describe Post do
  it { should delegate(:name).to(:author).with_prefix } # post.author_name
  it { should delegate(:month).to(:created_at) }
  it { should delegate(:year).to(:created_at) }
end

Credits go to txus. See the attached link for an RSpec 2+ version.

Skype has been updated to 4.3 on Linux. This fixes group chat issues with non-linux clients.

If you have previously installed skype via ubuntu packages, you need to remove those fist via

sudo apt-get remove skype skype-bin

Note

Try to install the 32 bit version. In serveral cases this was the way that worked out.

Grab the installer here:

If your requests blow up in Ruby or CURL, the server you're connecting to might only support requests with older SSL/TLS versions.

You might get an error like: OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError: SSL_connect SYSCALL returned=5 errno=0 state=unknown state

SSL Server Test

This SSL Server Test can help finding out which SSL/TLS versions the server can handle.

Ruby

In Ruby, you can teach Net::HTTP to use a specific SSL/TLS version.

uri = URI.parse(url)

ssl_options = {
   use_ssl: true,
   ssl_version...