Friday, January 10, 2014

Using Capybara and RSpec assertions in Page Objects

On my Rails project, I am using RSpec and Capybara to write functional tests.  I did not want to specify any HTML elements in my Capybara feature files, since that makes the feature files brittle to HTML / CSS changes. It also violates the DRY principle and basic code hygiene.

So, I decided to refactor out my HTML centric Capybara code into separate Page Objects. If you are unfamiliar with Page Objects, then read the following:



The Page Object pattern for encapsulating HTML centric DSL is a common pattern followed while writing UI level functional tests in ThoughtWorks.

The problem I was facing when I refactored my code into Page objects was that I was unable to use the RSpec 'expect' syntax in Page Objects. Turns out all I had to do in my page objects was:

include RSpec::Matchers

Here is the full code from my project on Github.
https://github.com/gsluthra/dakshina/tree/master/spec/features

The appropriate feature files and page objects in a GIST:
https://gist.github.com/gsluthra/8356015