Geb DSL Modules unrecognized within Intellij

Question

Going off the documentation here are Modules and other Geb DSL not expected to be recognized within a Spock Spec with IntelliJ? This makes using Geb with IntelliJ a bit cumbersome with no DSL reference. I noticed from this question that the asker did some custom work to get IntelliJ to wrap and notice the Geb DSL.

My questions is am I doing something wrong or is this expected and has there been any progress on getting the Geb DSL recognized by IntelliJ?

If not does anyone have a workaround for this issue/limitation and or another IDE that does recognized the Geb DSL?

Answer 1

IntelliJ has support for Geb DSL, I've been using it for years and there are even tests in IntelliJ's codebase that confirm it's there.

If you could share how your code looks like and what exactly does not work for you then maybe we can find a problem with your setup or expectations. It would also be good to know whether you are using community edition or professional edition.

Please note that the issue discussed in the question you linked to has been fixed by me in this PR and is no longer present since IntelliJ 2018.2.

EDIT:

After reading your comments under my response I now understand what the problem is. Your expectation is that IntelliJ will be able to figure out what the page type at runtime is and provide you with autocompletion. I'm afraid that is simply not possible - you need to track current page instance in your code for IntelliJ to be able to infer types.

Note that tests in geb-example-gradle are written in the very concise, yet dynamic style which means that IntelliJ is not able to infer types. What you need to do is to use the strongly typed style as described in the documentation. That section of the docs could do with a bit of improvement because it's not precise - I've created a Github issue to track that.

Essentially, if you tweak GebishOrgSpec from geb-example-gradle to:

class GebishOrgSpec extends GebSpec {

    def "can get to the current Book of Geb"() {
        when:
        def homePage = to GebishOrgHomePage

        and:
        homePage.manualsMenu.open()

        then:
        homePage.manualsMenu.links[0].text().startsWith("current")

        when:
        homePage.manualsMenu.links[0].click()

        then:
        at TheBookOfGebPage
    }
}

then IntelliJ will provide you with autocompletion.