click element if it exists in capybara

Question

I wish to click a popup message that appears on my test app if it is present. I am new to capybara and cant seem to find a way to do this. I have previous experience with watir and if I were doing it with watir it would be something like:

if browser.link(:text, "name").exists? do
   browser.link(:text, "name").click
end

How can I do the same in capybara? Note this link will not always appear hence why I wish to have the if statement.

Answer 1

A straight of the head code is to just invoke a has_link? matcher and then click_link action:

if page.has_link?('name')
  page.click_link('name')
end

But it will be not the fastest solution as Capybara will make two queries to driver to get element: first one in has_link? and the second one in click_link.

A better variant may be to make only one query to get an element:

# This code doesn't check that an element exists only at one place and just chooses the first one
link = first('name')
link.click if link

or

# This code checks that element exists only at one place
links = all('name')
unless links.empty?
  links.count.should == 1
  link = links.first
  link.click
end

Personally I would go with has_link?/click_link implementation as the second variant does't check that element exists only at one place and the third one is too long.

Answer 2

In case I used has_css? query :

if page.has_css?("button #popUpButton") 
    click_button(#popUpButton")
end