Error messages can't be found by capybara

[Daniel Salmerón Amselem]

Hi everyone!

I'm using Steak 1.1.0 for acceptance testing with Capybara 0.4.1.2, RSpec 2.5.0 and Rails 3.0.4, and I've tried to run a test like the one below, but unfortunately the message displayed doesn't seem to appear in the DOM.

  scenario "should not be able to create a group without a name" do

    visit("/groups/new")

    click_on "Save"

    page.should have_content("Please fillout this field.")

  end

I've tried to understand how those error notifications are implemented and it looks like is using the content_tag method to attach the error to the DOM. Does anyone have any advice on how to test this?

Is simple_form designed to show the error notifications without generating a new HTTP request to the 'create' action, and being redirected back to the 'new' one when there are errors on the object?

Any hint would be appreciate it. Thanks.

[Carlos Antonio da Silva]

Sorry, but I guess you're messing up things a bit, talking about acceptance testing, DOM, SimpleForm and http requests.

In the default scenario, when you click Save and your form has errors, it'd render the new action/view again. Assuming your object has errors, SimpleForm will just show them.

Remember SimpleForm is a form builder, it's not its responsibility to handle anything related to ajax, http requests, and all that stuff =)

--
At.
Carlos A. da Silva

[Daniel Salmerón Amselem]

Thanks Carlos, but my form doesn't generate an HTTP request to the "create" action when I click on the "Save" button. I've checked it on the rails server console. 

I understand simple_form is just a FormBuilder and doesn't have anything to do with HTTP requests and all that stuff. I also understand the errors are generated by the "create" action when you try to save the object. But in this particular case, if I leave the input field blank, it shows a message that says: "Please fillout this field" for a couple of seconds and then it disappears. My form looks like this:

= simple_form_for @group do |f|

  = f.input :name

  = f.button(:submit, 'Guardar')

and the Group model has a validates_presence_of :name

[Carlos Antonio da Silva]

Ok, so I believe you're doing some javascript work here, am I right?

If so, what's the capybara driver you're using? Rack-test does not work with javascript, so you'd have to use another driver such as selenium or culerity for instance.

[Daniel Salmerón Amselem]

I'm not using any javascript, and right now I'm testing it manually with Google Chrome. It's really weird, I don't know where is that message coming from.

I've make a small screen video recording so you can see what happens.

http://screenr.com/23f

If you need more information I would gladly give it to you. Oh! And thanks for helping me on this.

[Carlos Antonio da Silva]

Ahhh.. guess now I got it!

What I believe it's happening is that SF is generating a "required" attribute in your input (html5), based on the validation you have. Then Google Chrome makes it a required input, so it won't let you submit without filling in this field. But this message will never appear on your tests, it's a Chrome feature.

You will have to write tests with the default error messages, such as "can't be blank".

Your screencast helped a lot =D.

[Daniel Salmerón Amselem]

Wow!!! Thanks Carlos, you saved me a lot of hours with this. Do you think this is something that should be on the README file? I mean, this is something that can happen to a lot of people...

[Carlos Antonio da Silva]

I believe a more appropriate local is the wiki, what do you think?

Maybe you could open a new page there explaining about Google Chrome features and HTML5, and talk about the :required stuff.

Also, I guess someone was working on a feature to disable HTML5 features in SimpleForm, which would disable this :required attribute as well.  Sounds good to disable them with such "issues" sometimes imo, lets see how it goes.

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Daniel Salmerón Amselem <daniel....@gmail.com> wrote:

Wow!!! Thanks Carlos, you saved me a lot of hours with this. Do you think this is something that should be on the README file? I mean, this is something that can happen to a lot of people...

[Daniel Salmerón Amselem]

Sorry Carlos for this late response. I'll try to write this page sometime this week.

Daniel Salmerón Amselem

[Carlos Antonio da Silva]

No problem, do it at your time :)