Splinter

Splinter is a Capybara Ninja. It provides some helpers to aid with filling in Rails forms.

Bonus: Splinter also includes a few performance tweaks which can be used to speed up test suites. These are opt-in.

Installation

gem 'splinter'
bundle install

Add to spec_helper.rb:

require 'splinter/rspec'

Performance Tweaks

Capybara runs in a different thread when the driver is not rack-test. This can cause issues with transactional fixtures as ActiveRecord normally creates a new connection per-thread. If you need to force ActiveRecord to share the connection between threads, add the following to spec_helper:

require 'splinter/rspec/shared_connection'

While not technically related to Capybara, the following GC tweak can increase run time by 10% or more in some suites. To enable it, add the following to spec_helper:

require 'splinter/rspec/deferred_garbage_collection'

Screenshots

To capture screenshots on failure, add the following to spec_helper:

Splinter.screenshot_directory = "/path/to/screenshots"

Date/Time/Datetime Helpers

These are mostly borrowed from Hermes::Actions. They're useful for completing the multiple dropdowns required for a date/time/datetime field in a Rails form.

# Select by CSS ID
select_date Time.now, :id_prefix => :publish_at

# Select by label text, label must have for="id_prefix"
select_date Time.now, :from => "Publish at"

There are also select_time, and select_datetime variants with the same usage.

Completing Forms

Here's a little sugar to help complete Rails forms:

complete_form :post do |f|
  f.text_field :name, "I like turtles!"
  f.date       :publish_at, 3.days.from_now
  f.select     :category, "Blog Posts"
  f.checkbox   :published, false
end

After the block is evaluated, the form is completed and submitted.

Javascript Confirm

You can use these helpers to confirm/cancel a javascript "confirm":

javascript_confirm        { click_link "Destroy" }
javascript_confirm(false) { click_link "Destroy" }

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

Fork the project.
Make your feature addition or bug fix.
Add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
Commit, do not bump version. (If you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull).
Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.