Retry on timeout?

Question

I have a Cucumber Scenario for testing UI features. Sometimes due to one of the several issues, web-page takes lot of time to respond and Capybara times out with following error.

ruby-1.9.3-p327/lib/ruby/1.9.1/net/protocol.rb:146:in `rescue in rbuf_fill'
ruby-1.9.3-p327/lib/ruby/1.9.1/net/protocol.rb:140:in `rbuf_fill'
ruby-1.9.3-p327/lib/ruby/1.9.1/net/protocol.rb:122:in `readuntil'
ruby-1.9.3-p327/lib/ruby/1.9.1/net/protocol.rb:132:in `readline'
ruby-1.9.3-p327/lib/ruby/1.9.1/net/http.rb:2562:in `read_status_line'
ruby-1.9.3-p327/lib/ruby/1.9.1/net/http.rb:2551:in `read_new' 

My question is-

Can I somehow force Cucumber scenario or Capybara to retry (for constant number of times) whole scenario or step respectively, on timeout error?

Answer 1

Maybe, you can do it like this:

Around do |scenario, block|
  for i in 1..5
    begin
      block.call
      break
    rescue Timeout::Error
      next
    end
  end
end

But I can't figure out if this code works because of the bug (It's not possible to call block several times in Around hook)

Answer 2

From The Cucumber book:

Add a eventually method that keeps trying to run a block of code until it either stops raising an error or it reaches a time limit.

Here is the code for that method:

module AsyncSupport
  def eventually
    timeout = 2
    polling_interval = 0.1
    time_limit = Time.now + timeout
    loop do
      begin 
        yield
      rescue Exception => error
      end
      return if error.nil?
      raise error if Time.now >= time_limit sleep polling_interval
    end
  end
end
World(AsyncSupport) 

The method called be called as follows from a step_definition:

Then /^the balance of my account should be (#{CAPTURE_CASH_AMOUNT})$/ do |amount|
  eventually { my_account.balance.should eq(amount) }
end