Capybara Ambiguity Resolution

Question

How do I resolve ambiguity in Capybara? For some reason I need links with the same values in a page but I can't create a test since I get the error

Failure/Error: click_link("#tag1")
     Capybara::Ambiguous:
       Ambiguous match, found 2 elements matching link "#tag1"

The reason why I can't avoid this is because of the design. I'm trying to recreate the twitter page with tweets/tags on the right and the tags on the left of the page. Therefore it will be inevitable that identical links page shows up on the same page.

Answer 1

To add to the existing body of knowledge here:

For JS tests, Capybara has to keep two threads (one for RSpec, one for Rails) and a second process (the browser) in sync. It does this by waiting (up to the configured maximum wait time) in most matchers and node-finding methods.

Capybara also has methods that don't wait, primarily Node#all. Using them is like telling your specs that you'd like them to fail intermittently.

The accepted answer suggests page.first('selector'). This is undesirable, at least for JS specs, because Node#first uses Node#all.

That said, Node#first will wait if you configure Capybara like so:

# rails_helper.rb
Capybara.wait_on_first_by_default = true

This option was added in Capybara 2.5.0 and is false by default.

As Andrei mentioned, you should instead use

find('selector', match: :first)

or change your selector. Either will work well regardless of config or driver.

To further complicate things, in old versions of Capybara (or with a config option enabled), #find will happily ignore ambiguity and just return the first matching selector. This isn't great either, as it makes your specs less explicit, which I imagine is why no longer the default behavior. I'll leave out the specifics because they've been discussed above already.

More resources:

• https://robots.thoughtbot.com/write-reliable-asynchronous-integration-tests-with-capybara
• http://makandracards.com/makandra/20829-threads-and-processes-in-a-capybara-selenium-session

Answer 2

My solution is

first(:link, link).click

instead of

click_link(link)