Tag: xpath

Notes on Xpath / XML with css

Xpath adventures!

I was using a chunk of code that I found to be rather brittle for testing Xpath with Capybara in a ruby on rails integration test.  Originally I was just calling click_link on the first link within the .body tag.

The problem is that’s really brittle.  Any other links put in there before that will mess up the process.  Also, if I make that page a partial so I can reuse that particular list on other pages, then my test is broken.

So my practice now is to add a class or div to the top of all partials or pages even if I have the body & nothing else is in that page.

An example:

The partial _campaign.html.haml would have a .campaigns at the top wrapping it.  Then my html/css parsing with Xpath would be `.campaigns` to get into the section of the list I want to affect.

For my purposes that’s enough.  If you want to go deeper though – as you have more elements inside & need to be selective, then you would add more path hierarchy … .campaigns/.list-group/.list-group-item[1] … with the last [1] being select the first item in the list group.

Xpath best practices is to not stack too many or any nested items so they use within.  Still, probably best to only use two within‘s one to grab the first unique class/div name & the next to grab the last div or element before running the method against the result.

  • Instead the previous campaigns example, using the within would be combined with something else….
within('.campaigns') do
  first('.list-group-item').click_link('Join') 
end

Also, as a bonus I had to figure out the calls for using spaces in the names/titles.  There are two methods I like.

  • Exact matching with “multiple class selectors”… .something/.something_else – Link.
  • Matching Xpath to just search a string for a partial match with the xml/css  – Link.  I would still scope the search/match pattern (2nd method) by using a .within anyways as the whole point is avoiding brittle tests.