Follow table links in cucumber

On a page you’ll quite often have a table like the following

Book	Author
Harry Potter and half blood prince	J.K. Rowling	Delete
The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage	Cliff Stoll	Delete

In your cucumber steps you want to say

Given I am on the books page
When I follow the "Delete" link for "Harry Potter and half blood prince"
Then ...

Out of the box webrat doesn’t have a step that will allow you to do this. Let’s create one that will do the job

When /^I follow the "([^\"]*)" link for "([^\"]*)"$/ do |link, cell_value|
  within "//*[.//text()='#{cell_value}' and .//a[text()='#{link}']]" do |scope|
   scope.click_link link
 end
end

This works great, it even works outside tables, the step will work so long as the text and link have a common parent in the dom. Just one problem, for this step to work webrat needs to understand xpath selectors. Here’s a little monkey patch that will get it working in webrat 0.6.0.

#lib/webrat_extensions.rb
module Webrat
  class Scope
    protected
      def scoped_dom
        begin
          @scope.dom.css(@selector).first
        rescue Nokogiri::CSS::SyntaxError, Nokogiri::XML::XPath::SyntaxError => e
          begin
            @scope.dom.xpath(@selector).first
          rescue Nokogiri::XML::XPath::SyntaxError
            raise e
          end
        end
      end
  end
end

Once you’ve added the patch our new webrat step will work. As a bonus you also get to use xpath selectors anywhere you use css selectors.

This entry was posted on December 03rd, 2009 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.