assert_select

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

Testing the view of an application with functional tests, how would one go about checking that there are a certain number of <span> elements present on a page, which all belong to a certain class.

I tried:

      assert_select "form" do          assert_select "span", :class=> "required_field", :count => 13       end

But this just found all of the span elements on the page and returned false.

Grateful as ever for any help.

2

You need to use the css selector to specify spans with a particular class:

assert_select("span.required_field", :count => 13)

3

Jim Burgess wrote:

Hi,

Testing the view of an application with functional tests, how would one go about checking that there are a certain number of <span> elements present on a page, which all belong to a certain class.

I tried:

      assert_select "form" do          assert_select "span", :class=> "required_field", :count => 13       end

But this just found all of the span elements on the page and returned false.

At a guess...

   assert_xhtml do      form :xpath! => 'count(.//span[ @class = "required_field" ]) = 13'    end

If that doesn't work, look up the XPath syntax for count(). If that _still_ doesn't work, throw away assert_xhtml, and drop down raw XPath thru Nokogiri to do it.

(gem install rkelly nokogiri assert2, and require 'assert2/xhtml', to get assert_xhtml, IIRC..)

4

Thanks for the answers

I just looked again at the html rails is generating and in fact the element I'm looking for looks like this:

<span title="required field">*</span>

not:

<span class="required_field">*</span>

Would I test for this like so:

      assert_select "form" do         assert_select("span.title.required field", :count => 13)       end

When I run it, I get the error message: Expected at least 13 elements matching "span.required_field", found 0.

I installed the recommended gem and using that the test works just fine:

        assert_xhtml do           form :xpath! => 'count(.//span[ @title= "required field" ]) = 13'         end

One question however, is there any way to turn off the "...in this sample..." aspect of the output, as if the does find any errors, it returns my entire html page.

E.g.

  1) Failure: test_index_view(FormControllerTest)     [c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/assert2-0.5.3/lib/assert2/xhtml.rb:327:in `assert_xhtml'      /test/functional/form_controller_test.rb:41:in `test_index_view'      /test/functional/form_controller_test.rb:37:in `test_index_view']:

Could not find this reference...

<form xpath!="count(.//span[ @class = &quot;required field&quot; ]) = 13"></form>

...in this sample...

300 lines of html follow

5

To do what you want with assert_select you can use assert_select “form>span[title=required field]”, 13 That is there should be 13 span elements with given title inside form elements

or assert_select “form” do assert_select “span[title=required field]”, 13 end if you want to insist that all 13 are in the same form

Colin

6

assert_select "form" do   assert_select "span[title=required field]", 13 end

Excellent, that is exactly what I was after thanks very much.