Getting strange Capybara issues

Question

So I'm using capybara to test my backbone app. The app uses jquery animations to do slide transitions.

So I have been getting all kinds of weird issues. Stuff like element not found ( even when using the waiting finders and disabling the jquery animations ) I switched from the chrome driver back to Firefox and it fixed some of the issues. My current issues include:

• Sometimes it doesn't find elements if the browser window is not maximized even though they return true for .visible? if I inspect w pry. (this is a fixed with slide w no responsive stuff )

• and the following error:

   Failure/Error: click_link "Continue" Selenium::WebDriver::Error::StaleElementReferenceError: Element not found in the cache - perhaps the page has changed since it was looked up 

Basically, my questions are:

• what am I doing wrong to trigger these issues.
• can you tell me what if I have any other glaring issues in my code?
• and when using a waiting Finder, do I need to chain my click to the returned element to ensure it has waited correctly or can I just find the element and call the click on another line:

Do I have to chain like this

page.find('#myDiv a').click_link('continue')

Or does this work?

page.find('h1').should have_content('Im some headline')
click_link('continue')

Here is my code: http://pastebin.com/z94m0ir5

Answer 1

• I've also seen issues with off-screen elements not being found. I'm not sure exactly what causes this, but it might be related to the overflow CSS property of the container. We've tried to work around this by ensuring that windows are opened at full size on our CI server, or in some cases scrolling elements into view by executing JavaScript. This seems to be a Selenium limitation: https://code.google.com/p/selenium/issues/detail?id=4241

• It's hard to say exactly what's going wrong, but I'm suspicious of the use of sleep statements and a lot of use of evaluate_script / execute_script . These are often bad signs. With the waiting finder and assertion methods in Capybara, sleeps shouldn't be necessary (you may need to set longer wait times for some actions). JavaScript execution, other than being a poor simulation of how the user interacts with the page, don't wait at all, and when you use jQuery, actions on selectors that don't match anything will silently fail, so that could result in the state of the page not being correct.

• You do not have to chain. Waiting methods in Capybara are all synchronous.