How to fill ckeditor from capybara with webkit or selenium driver

Question

How can I fill a CKEditor area within Capybara, assuming I'm using a javascript capable driver like capybara-webkit or selenium?

Answer 1

Inspired from what I found here, I came up with the solution of using javascript to both set the data on the hidden textarea and on the CKEditor object. Neither seemed sufficient, depending on the circumstances.

def fill_in_ckeditor(locator, opts)
  content = opts.fetch(:with).to_json # convert to a safe javascript string
  page.execute_script <<-SCRIPT
    CKEDITOR.instances['#{locator}'].setData(#{content});
    $('textarea##{locator}').text(#{content});
  SCRIPT
end

# Example:
fill_in_ckeditor 'email_body', :with => 'This is my message!'

Answer 2

A small addition to Marc-André's awesome answer

If you are using nested form or multiple textareas in the same page generated IDs are pretty ugly and hard to write into tests (e.g. person_translations_attributes_2_biography) with this small addition to his method you can locate ckeditors using their labels instead of ID

# Used to fill ckeditor fields
# @param [String] locator label text for the textarea or textarea id
def fill_in_ckeditor(locator, params = {})
  # Find out ckeditor id at runtime using its label
  locator = find('label', text: locator)[:for] if page.has_css?('label', text: locator)
  # Fill the editor content
  page.execute_script <<-SCRIPT
      var ckeditor = CKEDITOR.instances.#{locator}
      ckeditor.setData('#{params[:with]}')
      ckeditor.focus()
      ckeditor.updateElement()
  SCRIPT
end

In this way instead of this

fill_in_ckeditor 'person_translations_attributes_2_biography', with: 'Some text'

you can write this

fill_in_ckeditor 'Biography', with: 'Some text'

Answer 3

For me Marc-André's answer switches iframe context in webkit driver. See this capybara-webkit issue

I found another way to fill in ckeditor input which doesn't change iframe context:

  def fill_in_ckeditor(id, with:)
    within_frame find("#cke_#{id} iframe") do
      find('body').base.send_keys with
    end
  end

and call it

fill_in_ckeditor 'comment', with: 'This is my message!'

Works both with webkit and selenium drivers

Inspired by this post