Capybara with :js => true causes test to fail

51
votes

I'm new to Capybara and testing on Rails in general, so please forgive me if this is a simple answer.

I've got this test

it "should be able to edit an assignment" do
    visit dashboard_path
    select(@project.client + " - " + @project.name, :from => "assignment_project_id")
    select(@team_member.first_name + " " + @team_member.last_name, :from => "assignment_person_id")
    click_button "Create assignment"
    page.should have_content(@team_member.first_name)
end

it passes as is, but if I add :js => true it fails with

cannot select option, no option with text 'Test client - Test project' in select box 'assignment_project_id'

I'm using FactoryGirl to create the data, and as the test passes without JS, I know that part is working.

I've tried with the default JS driver, and with the :webkit driver (with capybara-webkit installed)

I guess I don't understand enough what turning on JS for Capybara is doing.

Why would the test fail with JS on?

3
javascriptruby-on-rails-3capybara
It could be because different type of selectors are used when JS is on. I ran into similar weird problems like this one before. Can you modify your test and make the option your are selecting simpler (without " - ") for example select(@project.name, :from => "assignment_project_id") just to test it and see what happens? – Michal Kuklis
Thanks for the idea. Tried that, but unfortunately it didn't work. Now just get "no option with text 'Test project'" – evanmcd
For now, it seems that the workaround I'll use to is populate the test database with data and isolate each test to only require data from the database. Perhaps this is how it's supposed to be done from the start, but my impression was that you could insert a record using Capybara then act on data from that insertion as long as it was within the same "it" block. – evanmcd
I'm having this issue too. I'm using rspec and factory_girl and it's like that when using :js => true no records are being populated in db... – brutuscat

3 Answers

108
votes

I've read the Capybara readme at https://github.com/jnicklas/capybara and it solved my issue.

Transactional fixtures only work in the default Rack::Test driver, but not for other drivers like Selenium. Cucumber takes care of this automatically, but with Test::Unit or RSpec, you may have to use the database_cleaner gem. See this explanation (and code for solution 2 and solution 3) for details.

But basically its a threading issue that involves Capybara having its own thread when running the non-Rack driver, that makes the transactional fixtures feature to use a second connection in another context. So the driver thread is never in the same context of the running rspec.

Luckily this can be easily solve (at least it solved for me) doing a dynamic switching in th DatabaseCleaner strategy to use:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.use_transactional_fixtures = false

  config.before :each do
    if Capybara.current_driver == :rack_test
      DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction
    else
      DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
    end
    DatabaseCleaner.start
  end

  config.after do
    DatabaseCleaner.clean
  end
end
9
votes

A variation of brutuscat's answer that fixed our feature specs (which all use Capybara):

config.before(:suite) do
  DatabaseCleaner.clean_with(:truncation)
end

config.before(:each) do
  # set the default
  DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction
end

config.before(:each, type: :feature) do
  DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
end

config.before(:each) do
  DatabaseCleaner.start
end

config.append_after(:each) do
  DatabaseCleaner.clean
end
7
votes

There is another way to deal with this problem now described and discussed here: Why not use shared ActiveRecord connections for Rspec + Selenium?