Unable to force a click of a hidden element with Capybara

Question

I have an intermittent failure in my capybara tests caused by a modal not closing quickly enough and so covering the button that is to be clicked. The error message from Capybara tells me to try node.triger('click'). When I try this with the following code

find_button('Update').trigger('click')

I get this error:

 Failure/Error: find_button('Update').trigger('click')

 Capybara::NotSupportedByDriverError:
   Capybara::Driver::Node#trigger    

I am using the poltergeist driver e.g. in my rails_helper I have

Capybara.javascript_driver = :poltergeist

What is happening?

Answer 1

When you need a request or animation to finish in order for the next test to work, a solid strategy is to write a test that causes Capybara to wait until it passes. For example, if your modal with selector .modal disappears after clicking an OK button, you could write a test like:

click_button 'OK'
expect(page).not_to have_css '.modal'
click_button 'Update'

By default, Capybara waits for two seconds for animations and async requests to finish before failing a test. That can be configured with Capybara.default_max_wait_time = 5 to change it to 5 for example.

Answer 2

As sometimes happens, just by writing the question out, I found the answer. In the particular test in question, I had not set js: true. Another test in the same file where I received the original error message, did have js: true. Once I set js: true in all the tests in the file, I did receive consistent error messages and could use ```.trigger('click').