Dynamic page URL

Question

I have a page with URL that is dynamic. Let's call it view post page. URL for post 1 is site.com/post/1 and for post 2 is site.com/post/2.

This is what I do at the moment to check if I am at the right page.

The page:

class ViewPostPage
  include PageObject

  def self.url
    "site.com/post/"
  end
end

Cucumber step:

on(ViewPostPage) do |page|
  @browser.url.should == "#{page.class.url}#{@id}"
end

Is there a better way? Do you even bother checking the entire URL, or just the site.com/post/ part?

I am using the latest page-object gem (0.6.6).

Update

Even bigger problem is going directly to the page that has dynamic URL.

The page:

class ViewPostPage
  include PageObject

  def self.url
    "site.com/post/"
  end
  page_url url
end

Cucumber step:

visit ViewPostPage

What I do now is to change the Cucumber step to:

@browser.goto "#{ViewPostPage.url}#{@id}"

It would be great if there was a way for the page to know it's ID, but I have not figured out yet how to do it.

Answer 1

You can get the url for the page using the method current_url. On your test above are you trying to determine if you are on the correct page? If that is the case I might suggest using one of the two "expected" methods - expected_title and expected_element.

The page_url method is more than likely not the choice for you if you need to navigate to a url dynamically. What you might try instead is add a method to your page that does something like this:

class ViewPostPage
  include PageObject

  URL = "site.com/post/"

  expected_title  "The expected title"

  def navigate_to_post_with_id(id)
    navigate_to "#{URL}/#{id}"
  end

end

And in your test

on_page(ViewPostPage) do |page|
  page.navigate_to_post_with_id @id
  page.should have_expected_title
end

Let me know if this helps.

Answer 2

There is an option to check dynamic URL in the Page Object gem.

Use the below code:

class ViewPostPage

  include PageObject

      expected_url  "The expected URL"

  def initialize

     has_expected_url?

   end

end

It'll help you

Answer 3

As far as I know, #page_url is for opening corresponding page along with page object initialization. To verify you're on correct page, you can try to use #expected_title method.

Also, maybe it'll be useful for you. When symbol is passed to #page_url, it calls corresponding method, so'd better use it. I haven't tried it, but here are few links for you.

• Original issue on GitHub
• Specs
• Documentation of #page_url