I've been trying to make a web crawler for the company i work for using behat combined with the mink extension. I did something similar in the past as well but the difference is that now the page i am trying to crawl through is build in angularjs.
This seems to cause an issue in my xpath selector which can not locate the elements i am requesting in the DOM.
To ensure i have the right xpath and double check it i also use the Xpath Helper from chrome (extension).
My function that i try to use is :
/**
* @Then I login
*/
public function login()
{
$page = $this->getSession()->getPage();
$username = $page->find('xpath', "//*[@id='inputEmail']/self::INPUT");
$password = $page->find('xpath', "//*[@id='inputPassword']/self::INPUT");
if ($username == null && $password == null) {
echo "nothing found";
}
else{
$username->setValue('username');
$password->setValue('password');
}
}
In my .feature file i am able to access the login page and check that i am there by "seeing" some text in the dom to verify it is working, but when i try to fill the values in the fields above i am getting an error.
I guess it is an angular issue by the way it creates the DOM elements which causes my xpath unable to locate the fields i need but i can't think of a work around for this one.
Of course to use a JS framework like Protractor can be a solution but i would like to stay in php as it is easier maintainable by the team i am working with.
Any ideas would be more than welcome.
Few ideas: