Coffeescript preprocessor

[lebek]

Is this within the scope of the project or would you rather see it as a plugin?

[juliemr]

I'm trying to keep the project as lightweight on dependencies as possible, so this would be perfect for a plugin. I know little about coffeescript but would be happy to discuss design or make any changes to protractor that would be necessary for the plugin to work!

[juliemr]

Also @karlgoldstein who was also interested in this.

[lebek]

Thanks Julie - I've added plugin support to protractor (5147106) and built a coffeescript preprocessor (https://github.com/lebek/protractor-coffee-preprocessor).

The plugin support is loosely based on what they did with Karma. Some caveats I need to work out before submitting a pull request:

• preprocessed files get saved into a temporary directory, not sure how this plays with require
• no configuration option to map file patterns to preprocessors (for now this responsibility is delegated to the preprocessor itself)
• no way to pass configurations to the preprocessor

We're going to trial protractor for new E2E tests on a large angular project, I'll let you know how it goes.

[wizardwerdna]

Indeed, the lack of transparent coffeescript preprocessing is a serious barrier to adoption for our team. Karma made it trivial, without even the need to modify a config file.

[searls]

👍 - to teams that write CoffeeScript everywhere else this is a pretty major hindrance.

[DavidMikeSimon]

+1

[DavidMikeSimon]

Also, @lebek I'm confused: Why doesn't plugin support seem to be available in any branch of protractor? The parent of 5147106 is part of master, but it itself is not.

[jfroom]

@lebek does the coffee preprocesor work? I'm having trouble understanding how to get it running without any example code. I realize it may not be stable yet - but it would be great to be able to use coffeescript with protractor. Thanks.

[lebek]

Protractor's internals have changed a bit since I added plugin support. I'll look at merging the upstream changes this weekend and if possible I'll make a pull request.

[bjorne]

I found a very simple way to enable basic CoffeeScript support for specs. Simply put require('coffee-script'); inside the protractor config file. Then specifying a .coffee file in specs will work. Perhaps not the most elegant solution, but it seems to work.

Another thing; by is a keyword in CoffeeScript, so it would be nice to alias it to global.by_ (or something similar) in addition to global.by.

[jfroom]

Thanks @bjorne . I also had to run a npm install -D coffee-script for completeness sake.

[alexurdea]

You can alias by to something else in the config file, inside the onPrepare callback.

[matteosister]

@alexurdea could you please provide an example?

[matteosister]

I'm answering myself...something like:

exports.config = {
    onPrepare: function() {
        global.findBy = protractor.By;
    }
}

[alexurdea]

@matteosister I have:

exports.config = {
  onPrepare: function() {
    global.select = global.by;
  }
};

And then I use it like this: element(select.input("loginForm.username")).sendKeys(username)

[daniellmb]

Alternative workaround for "by" is to use JS escaping with backticks:

myButton = element `by`.name 'foo'

[eddiemonge]

Is there any reason the project has to use by.xyz? Can it maybe instead be changed to By.xyz? Makes more since especially since the actual name and object is By:
global.by = protractor.By;

[JakeBecker]

Adding require('coffee-script'); to my config file didn't work for Coffeescript 1.7.0, but it did work once I reverted to 1.6.3. With 1.7.0, the extension handler for .coffee files wasn't getting registered. I didn't investigate very much, but it appears that the extension-registering code (which is nicely annotated for the 1.6.3 version) has changed in 1.7.

[eddiemonge]

yeah, they made a breaking change in 1.7 that I haven't looked at how to integrate yet. This is from CS changelog:

When requiring CoffeeScript files in Node you must now explicitly register the compiler. This can be done with require 'coffee-script/register' or CoffeeScript.register(). Also for configuration such as Mocha's, use coffee-script/register.

Not sure why they did that or what needs to happen to make that work. Not sure if a fix for 1.7 will break previous versions. Will do some testing.

[JakeBecker]

Interesting. Just tried adding require('coffee-script/register'); to my Protractor config with 1.7 and it worked, but doing CoffeeScript.register(); caused an error complaining that CoffeeScript is undefined.

[eddiemonge]

require('coffee-script').register();

Seems to do it for me and works on 1.7 and 1.6.3

[flegall]

Same as @JakeBecker, the only way to use CS with protractor > 0.17 is to include require('coffee-script/register');.

And it requires upgrading to coffee-script 1.7 :(

[eddiemonge]

@flegall you can't do CoffeeScript.register() unless you do try { var CoffeeScript = require('coffee-script'); CoffeeScript.register(); } catch (e) {} and then its the same thing as https://github.com/angular/protractor/pull/473/files

[flegall]

Yes, but for some odd reason, I can't use CS anymore on protractor > 0.17, the only fix that works is to upgrade to CS >= 1.7 and to require('coffee-script/register');in the protractor configuration file.

[jtomaszewski]

@flegall is correct, I also had to write require('coffee-script/register'); in protractor config file.

[eddiemonge]

hmm ill take a look. maybe the 0.17 refactor has the references wrong now

[aleks-sidorenko]

@lebek , Is this plugin still working? I dont see 'plugins' config property in sample protractor config.

[zweifisch]

@aleks-sidorenko seems that no plugin is needed, just run protractor conf.coffee

[eddiemonge]

now you just have to include coffee-script in your npm modules and it will work atuomatically

[startswithaj]

+1 @eddiemonge. If your using something like coffeify in the rest of your project it wont work and will not throw an error. Because:

// Coffee is required here to enable config files written in coffee-script.
try {
  require('coffee-script').register();
} catch (e) {
  // Intentionally blank - ignore if coffee-script is not available.
}