Flow's post input fields morph from an input text field to a textarea upon click. I assumed that was why we use "text_field", as it works with either.

I think your test is accessing the topic title (name="topiclist_topic"), which continues to be an input text field after clicking, so textarea won't work.

We could make an intermediate Flow step definition

When I enter "Foo" in morphing |field_name|

that turns into

step I click in the <input field element>

and it becomes a <textarea element>

and I send_keys "My reply here" in the <textarea element>

but I'm not sure how in Ruby/Watir

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 11:29 AM, Chris McMahon <cmcmahon@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi,

so I noticed last week that the Flow builds were getting deprecation warnings from the test framework saying "Locating textareas with '#text_field' is deprecated. Please, use '#textarea' method instead."

I don't like being deprecated, but upon updating the test, to my surprise, the page_object gem could no longer see the element.

I filed an upstream bug for this: https://github.com/cheezy/page-object/issues/248

In the meantime, let's keep using the text_field locator as long as it keeps working for us.

=S Page Features engineer