cy.url not returning a string as expected

Question

Prior to switching to using a hash router, I had been implementing the cy.url command frequently to assure that links were navigating to the right URL addresses throughout the application. Now that we are using hash routing cy.url no longer yields a string, instead it is yielding a function. Any ideas how to work around this or reasons this is happening?

I was getting errors through out the cypress test runner like:

AssertionError: object tested must be an array, an object, or a string, but undefined given

so I logged the typeof result console.log(typeof(cy.url)) and got function printed to the console.

cy.get(dataCyButtonAttribute)
    .should('be.visible')
    .click()
  console.log(typeof(cy.url))
  cy.url().then(url => {
    const categoryId = url.split(`${linkType}/`)[1]
    const category = url.split('admin/')[1]
    expect(category).to.contain(linkType)
    expect(categoryId).to.equal('new')
  })
}

Answer 1

This should yield a string:

const returnedUrl = null
cy.url().then(url => {
  returnedUrl = url;
});

Cypress commands are asynchronous and must be followed by .then() in order to yield useful return values.

You can refer to this Github issue for more info: https://github.com/cypress-io/cypress/issues/2150