The following surprised me a lot! Predicates in the following statements will be removed
String selector = 'ul'
Map predicates = [class: 'catalog']
navigator.find predicates, selector
I found the following comments regarding this behavior:
/**
* Optimizes the selector if the predicates contains `class` or `id` keys that map to strings. Note this method has
* a side-effect in that it _removes_ those keys from the predicates map.
*/
My question. Is it really rule of good manners to change something in data coming to the function as an argument?
I remember such cases from C++ but in java world priority of integrity is higher that optimizing code at the expense of function caller!
I met this behavior in my program and spent lot of time to figure out why my definition structure is changing during execution. Thoughts of memory leaks were coming already.
It indeed is a bad practice and should not be done. I never thought that someone might reuse the predicate map passed to Navigator.find() but your use case is completely valid.
Please create a ticket for this in Geb's issue tracker.