How to assert on number of html table rows in ruby using capybara + cucumber

40
votes

I am trying to get to grips with BDD web development in Ruby using cucumber + capybara and I am stuck at what should be an easy task - just to check the number of rows in a table. The intention of what I'm trying to achieve is something along the lines of:

page.should have_xpath("//table[@id='myTable']")
find("//table[@id='myTable']/tr").length.should == 3

But this doesn't work (missing method length) and I can't find a way to assert against the table length.

Any ideas anyone (please be easy on me tho' I'm a ruby nooby)

Thanks in advance

Neil

6
rubycucumbercapybara
can you paste the complete error ? – Rishav Rastogi

6 Answers

61
votes

Even though have_css? will do the trick, your tests should tell you how they failed, rather than just saying some condition was supposed to be true and it was false. With this in mind, the first example below reads much better than the second:

# IF FAILED => "expected 10, got 7"
page.all('table#myTable tr').count.should == 10

# IF FAILED => "expected true, got false"
page.should have_css("table#myTable tr", :count=>10)
20
votes

I think you can do this:

page.should have_css("table#mytable tr", :count=>3)
13
votes

For some reason "has_css" does not work for me, however "all(selector)" works really wel

all("table#movies tr").count
3
votes

I went with this in the end:

Then /^I should see "(.*)" once$/ do |text|
    within_table('myTable') do
      should have_xpath("//tr", :text => text, :count => 1)
    end
end

which seemed suitably elegant.

I realise the other answers work but this seems to read well.

Any comments?

1
votes

The method #find only returns one element (I think it just returns the first one if there are several matches) so you don't get a #length method because the result of #find is a Node not an Array.

To prove this to yourself, try

puts find("//table[@id='myTable']/tr").class

What you want is #all, which will return you an Array of all the matching nodes.

1
votes

In this way you can learn the number of lines in the html table.

area = find_by_id('#areaID').all('tr').size

Assume that there are columns at the beginning of the table.You can reach the actual number in this way.

area = area-1