Conditional Testing

What you'll learn

• When conditional testing is a good choice for your tests
• Situations where conditional testing is impossible
• Strategies to handle common scenarios of conditional testing

The problem

The problem with conditional testing is that it can only be used when the state has stabilized. In modern day applications, knowing when state is stable is oftentimes impossible.

The situations

The only way to do conditional testing on the DOM is if you are 100% sure that the state has "settled" and there is no possible way for it to change

The strategies

A/B campaign

Use URL query params:

// tell your back end server which campaign you want sent
// so you can deterministically know what it is ahead of time
cy.visit('https://example.cypress.io?campaign=A')

...

cy.visit('https://example.cypress.io?campaign=B')

...

cy.visit('https://example.cypress.io?campaign=C')

Yes, this may require server side updates, but you have to make an untestable app testable if you want to test it!

Embed data in the DOM

cy.get('html')
  .should('have.attr', 'data-campaign')
  .then((campaign) => {
    return campaigns.test(campaign)
  })