capybara - Find with xPath is leaving the within scope

Question

I am trying to build a date selector with Capybara using the default Rails date, time, and datetime fields. I am using the within method to find the select boxes fo

Answer 1

You should specify in the xpath that you want to start with the current node by adding a . to the start:

find(:xpath, ".//select[contains(@id, \"_#{FIELDS[:year]}\")]")

Example:

I tested an HTML page of this (hopefully not over simplifying your page):

    

            
            field 1
        
    
    

        
            field 2
        
    
  

Using the within methods, you can see your problem when you do this:

within("div#div1"){ puts find(:xpath, "//span[contains(@id, \"field\")]").text }
#=> field 1
within("div#div2"){ puts find(:xpath, "//span[contains(@id, \"field\")]").text }
#=> field 1

But you can see that but specifying the xpath to look within the current node (ie using .), you get the results you want:

within("div#div1"){ puts find(:xpath, ".//span[contains(@id, \"field\")]").text }
#=> field 1
within("div#div2"){ puts find(:xpath, ".//span[contains(@id, \"field\")]").text }
#=> field 2