How to assert on number of html table rows in ruby using capybara + cucumber

Question

I am trying to get to grips with BDD web development in Ruby using cucumber + capybara and I am stuck at what should be an easy task - just to check the number of rows in a table. The intention of what I'm trying to achieve is something along the lines of:

page.should have_xpath("//table[@id='myTable']")
find("//table[@id='myTable']/tr").length.should == 3

But this doesn't work (missing method length) and I can't find a way to assert against the table length.

Any ideas anyone (please be easy on me tho' I'm a ruby nooby)

Thanks in advance

Neil

Solution 1

I went with this in the end:

Then /^I should see "(.*)" once$/ do |text|
    within_table('myTable') do
      should have_xpath("//tr", :text => text, :count => 1)
    end
end

which seemed suitably elegant.

I realise the other answers work but this seems to read well.

Any comments?

Solution 2

Even though have_css? will do the trick, your tests should tell you how they failed, rather than just saying some condition was supposed to be true and it was false. With this in mind, the first example below reads much better than the second:

# IF FAILED => "expected 10, got 7"
page.all('table#myTable tr').count.should == 10

# IF FAILED => "expected true, got false"
page.should have_css("table#myTable tr", :count=>10)

Solution 3

I think you can do this:

page.should have_css("table#mytable tr", :count=>3)

Solution 4

For some reason "has_css" does not work for me, however "all(selector)" works really wel

all("table#movies tr").count

Solution 5

The method #find only returns one element (I think it just returns the first one if there are several matches) so you don't get a #length method because the result of #find is a Node not an Array.

To prove this to yourself, try

puts find("//table[@id='myTable']/tr").class

What you want is #all, which will return you an Array of all the matching nodes.

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Comments

[Vadikus]

Those comments are from 2 years ago.. but Ye! They are really helpfull for my SaaS HW))))

[Neil]

Spooky - I wrote this question 2 years ago and now I am doing the Berkley SaaS course. The internet is a small place - either that or the whole internet is on the course :)

[Mike]

Agree with @andersonvom: much nicer when the test fails.