How to get parent node in Capybara?

Question

I'm working with many jQuery plugins, that often create DOM elements without id or other identification properties, and the only way to get them in Capybara (for clicking for example) - is to get their neighbor (another child of its ancestor) first. But I didn't find anywhere, does Capybara support such things for example:

find('#some_button').parent.fill_in "Name:", :with => name

?

Solution 1

I really found jamuraa's answer helpful, but going for full xpath gave me a nightmare of a string in my case, so I happily made use of the ability to concatenate find's in Capybara, allowing me to mix css and xpath selection. Your example would then look like this:

find('#some_button').find(:xpath,".//..").fill_in "Name:", :with => name

Capybara 2.0 update: find(:xpath,".//..") will most likely result in an Ambiguous match error. In that case, use first(:xpath,".//..") instead.

Solution 2

I found the following that does work:

find(:xpath, '..')

Capybara has been updated to support this.

https://github.com/jnicklas/capybara/pull/505

Solution 3

There isn't a way to do this with capybara and CSS. I've used XPath in the past to accomplish this goal though, which does have a way to get the parent element and is supported by Capybara:

find(:xpath, '//*[@id="some_button"]/..').fill_in "Name:", :with => name

Solution 4

If you stumbled across this trying to figure out how to find any parent (as in ancestor) node (as hinted at in @vrish88's comment on @Pascal Lindelauf's answer):

find('#some_button').find(:xpath, 'ancestor::div[@id="some_div_id"]')

Solution 5

This answer pertains to how to manipulate a sibling element which is what I believe the original question is alluding to

Your question hypothesis works with a minor tweak. If the dynamically generated field looks like this and does not have an id:

<div>
  <input></input>
  <button>Test</button>
</div>

Your query would then be:

find('button', text: 'Test').find(:xpath, "..").find('input').set('whatever')

If the dynamically generated input does come attached with an id element (be careful with these though as in angular, they are wont to change based on adding and deleting elements) it would be something like this:

find('button', text: 'Test').find(:xpath, "..").fill_in('#input_1', with: 'whatever')

Hope that helps.

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