Capybara can find but not fill_in

Question

I am having some very strange behaviour with Capybara. It stubbornly refuses to fill in the fields of my login form.

Answer 1

The locator for find and fill_in are different:

• find - When the first parameter is not a symbol, it is assumed to be the Capybara.default_selector - ie a css-selector or xpath.
• fill_in - The first parameter is the field's name, id or label text.

The string "#user_email" represents a css-selector. This is why it works in find but not fill_in.

For fill_in to work, you need to just pass in the id value - ie just "user_email".

within("#login_form"){ fill_in("user_email", with: "foo@example.com")}