Cucumber capybara fill_in failing - tdd

Question

I've been building a rails4 app and running through testing with cucumber and capybara but have hit a snag. I'm doing standard testing for user creation and user edit.
The user create test ran through without any issue but upon running through the test for editing the user I can't get capybara to actually fill in the new values into the fields. The form is the same for new and edit (I am including the same _form partial to both) and again it works fine on new but not edit.
Cucumber New User test:
When I fill in a User with:
| First Name | Rufus |
| Last Name | Firefly |
| Email | rfirefly#fake.com |
| Role(S) | System Admin |
Cucumber Edit User test:
When I fill in a User with:
| First Name | Otis |
| Last Name | Driftwood |
| Email | otis#fake.com |
Corresponding method:
When /^(?:|I) fill in (?:a|an|the) (.+) with:$/ do |obj, fields|
attrs = {}
fields.rows_hash.each do |name, value|
fill_in(name, with: value) unless name =~ /\((?:R|S)\)$/
choose(value) if name =~ /\(R\)$/
select(value) if name =~ /\(S\)$/
end
end
Rendered html form:
<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/members/1" class="edit_user" id="edit_user_1" method="post"><div style="margin:0;padding:0;display:inline"><input name="utf8" type="hidden" value="✓" /><input name="_method" type="hidden" value="put" /></div><div class='field'>
<label for="user_first_name">First Name</label>
<input id="user_first_name" name="user[first_name]" type="text" value="Ronald" />
</div>
<div class='field'>
<label for="user_last_name">Last Name</label>
<input id="user_last_name" name="user[last_name]" type="text" value="Kornblow" />
</div>
<div class='field'>
<label for="user_email">Email</label>
<input id="user_email" name="user[email]" type="email" value="kornblow#fake.com" />
</div>
<div class='field'>
<label for="user_password">Password</label>
<input id="user_password" name="user[password]" type="password" />
</div>
... omitted fields (not required) ...
<input name="commit" type="submit" value="Update User" />
</form>
Any help or insight anyone could give me I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

In your code you have:
When /^(?:|I) fill in (?:a|an|the) (.+) with:$/ do |obj, fields|
attrs = {}
fields.rows_hash.each do |name, value|
fill_in(name, with: value) unless name =~ /\((?:R|S)\)$/
choose(value) if name =~ /\(R\)$/
select(value) if name =~ /\(S\)$/
end
end
here, the fill_in(name, :value) method normally automatically looks for the ID tag id=name, but here your names don't line up exactly as shown by your rendered HTML form.
<div class='field'>
<label for="user_last_name">Last Name</label>
<input id="user_last_name" name="user[last_name]" type="text" value="Kornblow" />
</div>
Try changing your cucumber test to:
When I fill in a User with:
| user_first_name | Otis |
| user_last_name | Driftwood |
| user_email | otis#fake.com |
Hope this helps

Answer 2

So I did find the issue and I'm not happy about the last hour and a half that I lost due to what I believe was the problem...
I was using a nice little debugging tool for capybara to render the page and show it in the browser and this was not displaying the updated fields like I said above, but when i ran click_button() these values were in fact being saved.
The issue I was really having was that Devise, in all its infinite wisdom, was saving the new email address to unconfirmed_email and keeping the old email until the user gets the email and confirms. Makes sense but it was the first time I apparently ran into this.
So in my test:
Given a "User" was updated with:
| Last Name | Driftwood |
| Email | otis#fake.com |
the email attribute really wasn't 'otis#fake.com' and the test, as it always is (no matter how much I argue with it) was right. This user was not updated in with that email. Changing this to:
Given a "User" was updated with:
| Last Name | Driftwood |
| Email | kornblow#fake.com |
| Unconfirmed Email | otis#fake.com |
Solved the problem. I'm still confused why I was not seeing the fill(ed)_in() values when I rendered the page out tho. Kinda led me barking up the wrong tree.
Oh well...
Thanks for your help and hope this helps others...