CODEWITHSUNDEEP
seleniumcucumbercapybara
cin
cin

Reputation: 63

page.has_content?() vs. expect(page).to have_content

Hi people from StackOverflow,

I'm taking over someone's work, and my predecessor created a testset using Cucumber&Capybara&Selenium. I'm familiar with the lot, but I've got a question concerning his way of finding text on a page.

His implementation:

expect(page).to have_content(text)

My implementation:

page.has_content?(text)

What I've noticed is that the first implementation often fails because the automation is 'too quick' for the website to load its page. The latter seems a more robust implementation, perhaps because of its simplicity?

Can someone tell me if there's a right or a wrong, or whether these two are fundamentally different. Because I've been trying to search the web but have not really found a solid conclusion..

Thanks in advance!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 7195

Answers (2)

Kali
Kali

Reputation: 9

Ummm... I think that there is one more thing. expect(page).to_have_content(text) is Rspec method while page.has_content?(text) is Minitest method. It is just depend what type of testing you use in your project. I guess.

Upvotes: 1

Thomas Walpole
Thomas Walpole

Reputation: 49910

have_content raises an exception when it's expectation fails and should be used much more often in most test suites than has_content?. has_content? is basically just a wrapper around have_content that catches the exception and returns true or false, and is for use with conditionals

if page.has_content?(...)
  # click something
else
  # click something else
end

Your predecessor is using Capybara correctly since if you are testing to make sure a page has specific content you should be using have_content. has_content? will never fail the test (just silently return false and continue on). If your have_content assertions are failing because the site is too slow you probably need to increase Capybara.default_max_wait_time (or figure out why page load times are so long)

Upvotes: 9

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