How to select date from a select box using Capybara in Rails 3?

Question

I'm writing a spec for a controller in Rails 3 project using RSpec and Capybara, and I want to select current date from a select box. I tried:

select Date.today, :from => 'Date of birth'

but the spec fails and I get error:

Failure/Error: select Date.today, :from => 'Date of birth' NoMethodError: undefined method `to_xpath' for Mon, 18 Jul 2011:Date

How to fix it?

P.S. In view file I use simple_form_for tag and the select box is generated by code:

f.input :date_of_birth

Answer 1

Had the same problem. I googled at lot and solved it this way:

1. Wrote date select macros into /spec/request_macros.rb The select_by_id method is necessary for me, because the month is dependent on the translation

   module RequestMacros
     def select_by_id(id, options = {})
       field = options[:from]
       option_xpath = "//*[@id='#{field}']/option[#{id}]"
       option_text = find(:xpath, option_xpath).text
       select option_text, :from => field
     end
   
     def select_date(date, options = {})
       field = options[:from]
       select date.year.to_s,   :from => "#{field}_1i"
       select_by_id date.month, :from => "#{field}_2i"
       select date.day.to_s,    :from => "#{field}_3i"  
     end
   end
   

2. Added them to my /spec/spec_helper.rb

   config.include RequestMacros, :type => :request
   

Now in my integration tests in spec/requests i can use

select_date attr[:birthday], :from => "user_birthday"

Thanks to http://jasonneylon.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/selecting-from-a-dropdown-generically-with-capybara/ and https://gist.github.com/558786 :)

Answer 2

You need to specify the exact value as it's in the select menu in html. So if your select has values like "2011/01/01" then you need to write:

select '2011/01/01', :from => 'Date of birth'

Your code fails because you pass a date object.

Answer 3

with credit to Markus Hartmair for an excellent solution, I prefer to use labels as selectors because of improved readability. So my version of his helper module is:

module SelectDateHelper
  def select_date(date, options = {})
    field = options[:from]
    base_id = find(:xpath, ".//label[contains(.,'#{field}')]")[:for]
    year, month, day = date.split(',')
    select year,  :from => "#{base_id}_1i"
    select month, :from => "#{base_id}_2i"
    select day,   :from => "#{base_id}_3i"
  end
end

call it like this:

select_date "2012,Jan,1", :from => "From date"