behat fillField xpath giving error?

Question

This line of code:

$this->fillField('xpath','//fieldset[@id="address-container"]/input[@name="address_add[0][city]"]', "Toronto");

Is giving me this error

Form field with id|name|label|value|placeholder "xpath" not found. (Behat\Mink\Exception\ElementNotFoundException)

The reason I want to use xpath in my fillField is because there are actually multiple input[@name="address_add[0][city]"] in my html document. I figure an xpath will let me target specifically the field I want to populate.

What's the best way to fill out just the input[@name="address_add[0][city]"] that is a descendant of fieldset[@id="address-container"] ?

Answer 1

You are not using the method in the wright way.

As i see here xpath is taken as selector. The method expects 2 parameters:
identifier - value of one of attributes 'id|name|label|value'
value - the string you need to set as value

If you want to use css|xpath then you need to use find method first.

For example:

$this->find('xpath', 'your_selector')->setValue('your_string');

Please note that find might return null and using setValue will result in a fatal exception.

You should have something like this:

$field = find('xpath', 'your_selector');

if ($field === null) {
    // throw exception
}

$field->setValue('your_string');

Also your selector could be written as:

#address-container input[name*=city] - this with css

or

//fieldset[@id="address-container"]//input[contains(@name, 'city')]  - this with xpath

Make sure you take advantage of your IDE editor when you have any doubts using a method and you should find a php doc with what parameters are expected and what the method will return.

If you are using css/xpath a lot you could override find method to detect automatically the type of selector and to use it like $this->find($selector);

Also you could define another method to wait for the element and to handle the exception in one place, for example waitForElement($selector) that could contain a conditional wait up to 10 seconds and that throws exception if not found.