Question

I am running my tests for a rails application using test/unit and capybara. I am fairly new to rails, so I’m hoping that I’m missing something obvious. I have the following integration test to fill out a single field and submit a form. This works as expected and the test passes:

  test "create post with title only should add post" do
    assert_difference('Post.count') do
      visit '/posts/new'
      fill_in :title, :with => "Sample Post"
      click_button 'create Post'
    end

    assert current_path == post_path(Post.last)
    assert page.has_content?("Sample Post")
  end

I added a second test, that pretty much copies the previous test but also fills out a second field and checks for the additional input (this fails).

  test "create post with title and body should add post" do
    assert_difference('Post.count') do
    visit '/posts/new'
      fill_in :title, :with => "Testing"
      fill_in :body, :with => "This is a sample post"
      save_and_open_page
      click_button 'create Post'
    end
    save_and_open_page
    assert current_path == post_path(Post.last)
    assert page.has_content?("Testing")
    assert page.has_content?("This is a sample post")
end

When this failed, I added the call to:

save_and_open_page

and found that the form was being filled out with the title value from the previous test and no body value was supplied at all. The name of the test and the assertions match the second test, so this isn’t a case of mistaken identity. It seems that Capybara isn’t getting the updated values. I also have this code in my test_helper.rb file:

DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation

module ActionController
  class IntegrationTest
    include Capybara::DSL

    self.use_transactional_fixtures = false

    teardown do
      DatabaseCleaner.clean
      Capybara.reset_sessions!
      Capybara.use_default_driver
    end
  end
end

I’m assuming this should clear out values in between tests. Since that clearly wasn’t happening, I also tried adding a call to Capybara.rest_sessions! at the end of the first test and that didn’t help.

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I figured it out. I was calling the fill in method with the symbol :title instead of a string for the field id. I needed to be using ‘post_title’. I started that way, but was not prefixing the name with the model name so it wasn’t found and it started working when I changed to the symbol that I was using in my erb code.

So use:

fill_in 'post_title', :with => "whatever"

instead of

fill_in :title, :with => "whatever"