How to click first link in list of items after upgrading to Capybara 2.0?

Question

You can just use:

first('.item').click_link('Agree')

or

first('.item > a').click

(if your default selector is :css)

---

Code in your question doesn't work as:

within ".item" do
  first(:link, "Agree").click
end

is equivalent to:

find('.item').first(:link, "Agree").click

Capybara finds several .item's so it raises an exception. I consider this behavior of Capybara 2 very good.

Try the following:

within ".item" do
  click_link("Agree", :match => :first)
end

Sources:

• http://rubydoc.info/github/jnicklas/capybara/master/Capybara/Node/Actions#click_link-instance_method
• https://github.com/jnicklas/capybara#strategy

This phrasing also works:

within first(".item") do
  click_link "Agree"
end

most of those solutions will not use Capybara's brilliant waiting features

better do as this link suggests:
https://thoughtbot.com/blog/write-reliable-asynchronous-integration-tests-with-capybara#find-the-first-matching-element

Bad:

first(".active").click
If there isn’t an .active element on the page yet, first will return nil and the click will fail.

Good:

If you want to make sure there's exactly one
find(".active").click

If you just want the first element
find(".active", match: :first).click
Capybara will wait for the element to appear before trying to click.

Note that match: :first is more brittle, because it will silently click on a different element if you introduce new elements which match.

Xpath can address the element. I'm not very good with it yet, but something like //div[@class='active'][1]/a

That may or may not work, but the point is that xpath can address an array of matches and pull out a particular one. You should be able to match with this.

A working example example from one of my projects:

within page.find("div.panel", text: /Proposals/) do
  within page.find('tr', text: /Foo/) do
    page.should have_xpath('td[3]', text: @today)
  end
end

Since first() doesn't always wait, perhaps this is useful:

expect(page).to have_css("selector")                               
first("selector").click