As mentioned in commit 5311daadf, there are several reasons to use
buttons in these situations. And, as mentioned in the previous commits,
using buttons instead of links for actions requiring confirmation will
help us test for accessibility issues.
Out of the usability issues I've experienced when using Consul
Democracy, the biggest one has arguably been the fact that the link to
edit a proposal opens in a new tab. I guess the reasoning behind it is
that the page to edit a proposal is not part of the proposals dashboard,
but what the hell! Imagine if every link to edit something opened in a
new tab...
So we're reducing the impact of this nonsense by opening most dashboard
links in the same window; for now, we're still opening in a new window
links to download files and links that might point to external websites.
We'll address those ones in the future.
We applied the Capybara/SpecificMatcher in commit f52a86b46. However,
this rule doesn't convert methods finding <a> tags to methods finding
links because <a> tags only count as links when they've got the `href`
attribute. For instance, in the `xss_spec.rb` file we check what happens
when clicking on an anchor tag because we're testing that the `href`
attribute has been removed and so we can't use `click_link`.
So, basically, we can't enable a rule to automatically detect when we're
using `have_css` instead of `have_link`, but we should still do it
because `have_link` adds an extra check which affects accessibility
since it makes sure the tag has the `href` attribute and so it's
recognizable as a link by screen readers.
Just like we did in commit 0ec8878db, we remove the useless initial
request in the `before` filter since most tests started by visiting a
different URL.
We also reduce the risk of database inconsistency which comes with
setting up the database after the browser has been started.
The test was hanging sometimes on my machine, probably because we
weren't making sure the request submitting the form had finished before
visiting a new page.
In theory the spec should have been fine from a technical point of view:
since submitting the form generates a regular HTTP request (and not an
AJAX one), Capybara/Selenium/Chromedrive should wait until the request
is finished. But that doesn't seem to be the case 100% of the time;
maybe conditions change depending on previous tests.
On the other hand, from a design point of view, the spec wasn't that
fine. The main purpose of system specs is to test the way users interact
with our application, and users don't click a button and immediately
visit a different page. Instead, most users wait until they receive
feedback of their actions, and then they visit a different page.
Of course some users might visit another page without waiting. What
happens then cannot be predicted (it will depend on which request is
handled first), and so there's no point in writing a test for this case
unless there's a specific concurrency issue we'd like to check.
JavaScript is used by about 98% of web users, so by testing without it
enabled, we're only testing that the application works for a very
reduced number of users.
We proceeded this way in the past because CONSUL started using Rails 4.2
and truncating the database between JavaScript tests with database
cleaner, which made these tests terribly slow.
When we upgraded to Rails 5.1 and introduced system tests, we started
using database transactions in JavaScript tests, making these tests much
faster. So now we can use JavaScript tests everywhere without critically
slowing down our test suite.
We've had to add a couple of hacks in order to make jQuery UI datepicker
work with Turbolinks, and one of our tests is failing because the
datepicker changes its height when changing from a month with 5 weeks to
a month with 6 weeks.
We could add a workaround so the test still passes (jQuery UI doesn't
provide a configuration option to always displays 6 weeks in the
datepicker), but I think it's easier to just use the HTML5 native date
input field, which also allows us to simplify the code a bit and IMHO it
improves the user experience, particularly when using mobile phones.
Since date fields are not supported in Safari and Internet Explorer,
we're still using the jQuery UI datepicker on those browsers (and on any
other browser not supporting date fields).
Due to these changes, we're moving the tests checking datepicker's
behaviour to the dashboard. I've choosing not to change the public pages
because I'm not 100% sure everybody would like this change (some people
prefer the datepicker because we can configure the way it looks).
