Question

The html snippet:

<table id="project_1">
  <thead>
    ...
    <tr>
      <form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/projects/1/tasks" class="add-task form-search" 
        data-remote="true" id="new_task" method="post"></form>
      <th><input class="input-xlarge" id="task_content" name="task[content]" 
        placeholder="Start typing here to create a task..." size="50" type="text"></th>
      <th><input class="btn" name="commit" type="submit" value="Add Task"></th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  ...
</table>

The rspec test with capybara:

it "should create a task", :js => true do
  visit projects_path
  within("#project_#{@project.id}") do
    fill_in "task[content]", :with => "This is a new task"
    save_and_open_page
    click_button 'Add Task'
  end
  page.should have_content("This is a new task")
end

Capybara successfully found all elements on a page, but in the page (generated by save_an_open_page) the field ‘task[content]’ is empty.

What might be a problem here? Thanks

UPDATE:

The html code generated from this erb:

...
<%= form_for [project, Task.new], html: { :class => "add-task form-search" }, remote:   true do |f| %>
  <th><%= f.text_field :content, :class => "input-xlarge", :placeholder => "Start typing here to create a task...", :size => 50 %></th>
  <th><%= f.submit "Add Task", :class => "btn" %></th>
<% end %>
...

Answer 1

UPDATE:

The closed tag (noticed by @Steve) may indeed be your problem. Here is someone with the same problem: form_for closes <form> tag

I suspect the problem may be your HTML tags in the form. What if you remove the table row/header tags, like this:

<%= form_for [project, Task.new], html: { :class => "add-task form-search" }, remote:   true do |f| %>
  <%= f.text_field :content, :class => "input-xlarge", :placeholder => "Start typing here to create a task...", :size => 50 %>
  <%= f.submit "Add Task", :class => "btn" %>
<% end %>

See if that generates the correct HTML first (with the <form> tags wrapping the <input> tags, and then see if that makes the spec pass.

ORIGINAL ANSWER:

I suspect that the problem is not with fill_in, but with what happens after it (adding the task). In my own test, I found that save_and_open_page does not show the text in the actual field even when the test actually does work. Are you sure there is not a problem with adding the new task to the page after form submission?

Other things to try:

1. Remove the within block and see if it works.
2. Try using the field’s id instead of its name in fill_in, i.e.: fill_in "task_content", :with => "This is a new task"' and see if that works.