Accidental Technologist

Musings about Entrepreneurship, Technology and Software Development

When You Can’t Check a Checkbox using Capybara

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In my last post I documented an issue I was having using Capybara on a client’s Ruby on Rails application with a ReactJS frontend.  I wanted to share another issue I came  across during my feature testing escapades.

The Problem

During my recent feature testing project I had a form which has a checkbox on it. The checkbox had a label with it. Did I mention this is a ReactJS frontend? I’m not sure if this is specific to ReactJS, but I suspect it isn’t. I think other frontend JavaScript frameworks may exhibit the same problem.

The Ruby code for my feature test is dead simple:

check “English”

That’s it. The test should run and when it finds the checkbox with a label of English, the checkbox should be checked. But, it doesn’t work. After many attempts at making this work and more Google searches than I can remember..I ended up at the Capybara mailing list.

The Solution

Thomas Walpole was kind enough to reply with his thoughts on the matter:

99.9% sure your checkbox isn’t actually visible on the screen.

What you’re describing as the “checkbox” is probably an image (probably added via CSS pseudo elements) being shown in place of the actual checkbox input element to ensure the same styling across different browsers.  If the checkbox has a label element correctly attached to it you can use `check(‘whatever’, allow_label_click: true)` – https://www.rubydoc.info/ github/jnicklas/capybara/ Capybara/Node/Actions#check- instance_method –  to tell Capybara to click the label element instead of the hidden checkbox input to toggle state.  If you don’t have an associated label then you’ll need to find whatever element is actually visible on the page and click it instead.

Changing my test to include this for the checkbox, worked perfectly.

check(“English", allow_label_click: true)

I hope someone finds this valuable and will save them some time and hair pulling.

Maybe You Are Doing Too Much Test Driven Development

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I came across this StackOverflow post from 2008 where someone wanted to know when a developer can do too much testing. ?Simply brilliant summary by the father of test-driven development (TDD), Kent Beck:

I get paid for code that works, not for tests, so my philosophy is to test as little as possible to reach a given level of confidence (I suspect this level of confidence is high compared to industry standards, but that could just be hubris). If I don’t typically make a kind of mistake (like setting the wrong variables in a constructor), I don’t test for it. I do tend to make sense of test errors, so I’m extra careful when I have logic with complicated conditionals. When coding on a team, I modify my strategy to carefully test code that we, collectively, tend to get wrong.

Different people will have different testing strategies based on this philosophy, but that seems reasonable to me given the immature state of understanding of how tests can best fit into the inner loop of coding. Ten or twenty years from now we’ll likely have a more universal theory of which tests to write, which tests not to write, and how to tell the difference. In the meantime, experimentation seems in order.

I always find interesting to read so many blog posts about how to do TDD, including unit tests, integration tests, functional tests, factories, mocking and on and on. ?There are conferences dedicated to software quality and software craftsmanship where TDD is advocated as all-in and anything less is not doing the right thing.

Clients pay me to write code too and not tests. ?I write tests just enough to know the critical pieces of my system are working?.and continue to work. ?Developers could easily spend double their time writing completely tested systems and I’m not sure the customer gets 2X the value or ROI.

I think experimentation is certainly in order and see what best fits your situation. ?The biggest takeaway, step back and decide for yourself what’s the right amount of testing and don’t simply follow the pied pipers of TDD. ? Lots of great feedback from the others in response to the original question in that thread and great food for thought.

UPDATE: If you want to hear another developer’s perspective on TDD and using it as-needed, Marco Arment discusses how he uses testing in his very successful business on the latest Build and Analyze. ?Very timely to my post.