Make your Rails Capybara testing even faster and more accurate! Looking for hardcoded text strings is for the birds.

A lot of this assumes you're using a form builder to generate forms, like Formtastic. It's faster that way.

Your Views

It's easier to find things in Capybara tests if you add extra data attributes to fields and such. This gem does that for you if you link to and refer to things in a certain way. If you do, your tests turn from text blob and CSS selector messes to nice, clean, simple references to objects and attributes.

Linking to things

Link to things using link_to_model, link_to_model_action, link_to_collection, and link_to_route. Data attributes will be added that Capybara can then find later, and quickly:

#menu
  = link_to_route :root
  = link_to_collection [ :admin, :users ]
  = link_to_model current_user
  = link_to_model_action current_user, :edit

# finding those things

within '#menu' do
  find_semantic_link(:root)
  find_semantic_link(:users)
  find_object(@user)
  find_action(:edit)
end

Form fields

Don't worry about tying your field entry with text labels. It's much easier to look for attributes by name:

find_input(:first_name).set("first name")
find_input(:last_name).set("last name")
set_input(:gender, 'male')
find_submit.click

Attributes

Write out attributes using attributes_for:

#object
  = attributes_for object do |f|
    %h2= f.field(:name)
    %h3= f.field(:description)

Then look for those fields using Capybara! Because you shouldn't care about the DOM, just that your field is in there:

@object = Object.create!(:name => @name, :description => @description)

visit object_path(@object)

find_attribute(:name, @object.name)
find_attribute(:description, @object.description)

You can even make simple tables, a la Active Admin:

#object
  = attributes_table_for object do |f|
    = f.field :name
    = f.field :description

Not Finding Things

Sometimes the absence of a thing is just as important as the presence of a thing. Make it easy on yourself:

# selector's not there

dont_find('#user')