Question

I have a cucumber step that involves the following:

When /^I select from the Open table project with details "([^"]*)"$/ do |details|
  find('.details', :text => details).click
end

It fails with the following error message Unable to find css ".details" (Capybara::ElementNotFound)

This step fails about 90% of the time I run it, but occasionally it works. I inspect the page source, and the page does indeed have a css class .details with text that corresponds to details.

Is this some kind of timing issue or issue with cucumber? Or is it more likely that, now that Cucumber has driven me bat-poop insane, I’m not seeing things correctly?

Answer 1

Based on this post: Why does it seem like the Capybara "wait for page to load" timer works for matchers but not finders?

It seems that the find method does not wait for the page to be loaded before doing it’s thing. Which means you have a race condition, and cucumber is losing about 90% of the time.

You can warp it in a wait_until block to specify your own timeout and pass the test

page.wait_until(5) { find('.details', :text => details) }
find('.details', :text => details).click