I have a table and I want to ensure that values are not repeated within a column using Cypress. Currently, I am doing

cy.get("#myTable")
  .find(".table")
  .contains("unique_value")
  .should("exist")

This piece of code does check if a value in a column exists but it doesn't ensure that its the only entry with this value in the table. How do I check for uniqueness through Cypress?

I have a table and I want to ensure that values are not repeated within a column using Cypress. Currently, I am doing

cy.get("#myTable")
  .find(".table")
  .contains("unique_value")
  .should("exist")

This piece of code does check if a value in a column exists but it doesn't ensure that its the only entry with this value in the table. How do I check for uniqueness through Cypress?

• javascript
• testing
• cypress

2 Answers 2

Surprisingly, this

cy.get("#myTable")
  .find(".table")
  .contains("unique_value")
  .should('have.length', 1);

or even this

cy.get("#myTable")
  .find(".table td")
  .contains("unique_value")
  .should('have.length', 1);

will return a false positive - if you run it with two unique_value table cells it incorrectly passes.

Ref contains - yields indicates a single value is returned.

The best way I found was to shift the contains() up into the .find() selector,

cy.get("#myTable")
  .find('.table td:contains("unique_value")')
  .should('have.length', 1)

The above tests uniqueness between cells. If you want to also test the value within the cell, the simplest way is to invoke the text() method.

cy.get("#myTable")
  .find('.table td:contains("unique_value")')
  .should('have.length', 1)          // ensure only one cell has value
  .invoke('text')
  .should('equal', 'unique_value')   // check the exact content of the cell

See the first example on this page Assertions

sorry about the previous answer, I forgot with .contains it selects sorts out 1 element from the found list. anyway, there are two ways to do this.

1st : it'll look like,

  cy.get(".table") 
   .find(('td:contains("unique_value")'))
   .should('have.length', 1) 

Note: This might be problematic if the same table cell has repetitive unique_value

For example: Let's say you are expecting a unique id (1234) in a table cell, but the table looks as follows

<tr>
<td>1234, 1234<td>
<td>value<td>
<tr>

If we take this scenario, the above solution will make the test as passed even though the unique id is repeated in the same cell. If you want to validate those kinds of scenarios too, I think the best solution would be,

  cy.get(".table")
  .then($el => {
    expect($el[0].innerText.split('unique_value').length).to.equal(2)
  })

in this case, if the table does not contain unique_value the array length will be 1 and if it has more than 1 unique_value the array length will be more than 2 so, this will work with any string, paragraph, table, etc.

cheers.