Working With Rails

Hpricot Forms

I love to use HtmlUnit to do web-based navigation tests, back in Java land. So I’m attempting to re-create a similar testing experience here.

Installation

./script/plugin install http://choonkeat.svnrepository.com/svn/rails-plugins/hpricot_forms

Examples

In a hypothetical application login application, we write the functional test like this:

def test_login_logout page = get :new # first, let’s get to the login page form = page.forms.first # next, get a reference to the form end

1. form.field_names => [“user[login]”, “user[password]”] # form.field_names returns you the input fields # available in the form

form["options[]"]        = ["secure", "remember"] 
                             # e.g. options[] fields are checkboxes

form["user[login]"]    = "Joe" 
form["user[password]"] = "topsecret" 
                             # these are single-value inputs

page = form.submit(self)   # after setting the form values, submit it
                           # 'page' now references the page after login

assert_response :success

1. page.links # returns you an array of links found on the page

page = page.links("@id='signout'").first.click(self)
                           # locate the sign-out link by its html ID 
                           # attribute and click it

assert_response :success

Notice we didn’t need to handle things like session and where the form submits to explicitly. It simply goes to where its supposed to – as rendered. And yes, as you do submit() and click() you might actually cross different controllers. HpricotForms handles that for you.

The main thing I like about this API is, the field names in the form are real. When you modify your action template (.rhtml files) but forgot to change your test and controllers – traditionally, your tests will still pass because you were passing in parameters explicitly, e.g.

post :login, {:user => {:login => "Joe", :password => "topsecret"}}

even though your HTML form fields might have been changed to “account[login]” and “account[passwd]”.

But HpricotForms will raise an exception when you try to set values into fields that does not exist in the rendered form.

Notes

I don't really like doing 'instance_variable_get' but that's how I can get it to work now. Even worse, I don't like the explicit 'self' argument required to do submit() and click(). Any suggestion will be appreciated.

Tests

Not implemented

Rake

Not implemented

Thanks to

HtmlUnit’s API [http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net/gettingStarted.html] _why’s Hpricot library [http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/hpricot01.html]

License

HpricotForms is released under the MIT license.

Author

Chew Choon Keat <choonkeat gmail at> http://blog.yanime.org/

19 July 2006

NOTE: This description has been extracted from the Plugin README and so the formatting may need updating to make browser friendly