Question

I’m having trouble debugging cucumber steps due to unique conditions of the testing environment. I wish there was a step that could pause a selenium test and let me take over.

E.g.

Scenario: I want to take over here
  Given: A bunch of steps have already run
  When: I'm stuck on an error
  Then: I want to take control of the mouse

At that point I could interact with the application exactly as if I had done all the previous steps myself after running rails server -e test

Does such a step exist, or is there a way to make it happen?

Answer 1

I came up with the idea to dump the database. It doesn’t let you continue work from the same page, but if you have the app running during the test, you can immediately act on the current state of things in another browser (not the one controlled by Selenium).

Here is the step:

When /I want to take control/i do
  exec "mysqldump -u root --password=* test > #{Rails.root}/support/snapshot.sql"
end

Because it is called by exec, DatabaseCleaner has no chance to truncate tables, so actually it’s irrelevant that the command is a database dump. You don’t have to import the sql to use the app in its current state, but it’s there if you need it.