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

ruby cucumber capybara
Neil picture Neil · Jun 7, 2010 · Viewed 24.3k times · Source

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

Answer

andersonvom picture andersonvom · Mar 16, 2012

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)

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