Select Date.today from date_select in integration test

Question

I have a form with a date_select which shows 3 selectboxes for day, month and year. I have a rspec integration test where I want to select today's date with capybara. So I have to split Date.today into a day, month and year. What's a good way to do this? I could do some string splits, but maybe there is a more sophisticated way to do?

Here you see the capybara code to select the date hard coded:

select("13", :from => "visit_visit_date_3i")
select("July", :from => "visit_visit_date_2i")
select("2012", :from => "visit_visit_date_1i")

Answer 1

There are methods for extracting date parts from a Date object. The date class also has some constant arrays that make it easy to convert things like months and days of the week to their English versions.

Thus:

Date.today.day 
=> 13
Date::MONTHNAMES[Date.today.month] 
=> "July"
Date.today.year 
=> 2012

All this is in the docs for Date, which are located here .

Answer 2

You might consider using timecop to freeze the current date. This comes in handy later when testing whether other methods that deal with 'today' or 'one week from today'

before { Timecop.freeze(Date.parse("Jul 13 2012") }
after { Timecop.return }

Now you can select("13", :from => "visit_visit_date_3i") and it will work for any date on which the test is run.