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8 Advanced Page Navigation

Page classes can customise how they generate URLs when used in conjunction with the browser to() method.

Consider the following example…

import geb.*

class ExamplePage extends Page {
    static url = "example"
}

Browser.drive("http://myapp.com/") {
    to ExamplePage
}

This will result in a request being made to “http://myapp.com/example”.

The to() method can also take arguments…

Browser.drive("http://myapp.com") {
    to ExamplePage, 1, 2
}

This will result in a request being made to “http://myapp.com/example/1/2”. This is because by default, any arguments passed to the to() method after the page class are converted to a URL path by calling toString() on each argument and joining them with “/”.

However, this is extensible. You can specify how a set of arguments is converted to a URL path to be added to the page URL. This is done by overriding the convertToPath() method. The Page implementation of this method looks like this…

String convertToPath(Object[] args) {
    args ? '/' + args*.toString().join('/') : ""
}

You can either overwrite this catch all method control path conversion for all invocations, or provide an overloaded version for a specific type signature. Consider the following…

class Person {
    Long id
    String name
}

class PersonPage {
    static url = "person"

    String convertToPath(Person person) {
        person.id.toString()
    }
}

def newPerson = new Person(id: 5, name: "Bruce")

Browser.drive {
    go "http://myapp.com/"
    to PersonPage, newPerson
}

This will result in a request to “http://myapp.com/person/5”.

8.1 Named params

Any type of argument can be used with the to() method, except named parameters (i.e. a Map). Named parameters are always interpreted as query parameters. Using the classes from the above example…

Browser.driver {
    go "http://myapp.com/"
    to PersonPage, newPerson, flag: true
}

This will result in a request to “http://myapp.com/person/5?flag=true”. The query parameters are not sent to the convertToPath() method.

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