Protractor - How to obtain the new URL - protractor

Question

I am new to Protractor (and Javascript by the way), and I am writing some tests to practice. My goal so far is to check that when I click on the home button of a website, the redirection leads me correctly to the expected address.
I have written this:
var HomeTopBanner = function() {
this.homeUrl = browser.params.homePageObject.homeUrl;
this.topBanner = element(by.css('.navbar-inner'));
this.homeButton = this.topBanner.element(by.css('.icon-home'));
}
describe('Home button', function(){
var homeTopBanner = new HomeTopBanner();
var newUrl = '';
it('clicks on the Home button', function(){
homeTopBanner.homeButton.click();
browser.getCurrentUrl().then(function storeNewUrl(url) {
newUrl = url;
});
})
it('checks that the home button leads to the homepage', function(){
expect(newUrl).toEqual(homeTopBanner.homeUrl);
})
});
This works, but my question is:
Why do I need to separate the "GetCurrentUrl" and the "expect(newUrl)" parts? I would prefer to have both of them in the same spec, but if I do that, during the comparison of the expect, newUrl=''
I assume this is related to browser.getCurrentUrl() being a promise, but is there a better way to do it?

Answer 1

Yes, getCurrentUrl returns a promise with the url in the form of a string as explained in the protractor api docs. You have to wait until the url is returned in order to use it. Now in order to combine both the specs you can write your expect statement inside the function that getCurrentUrl returns as shown below and there is no need of using a newUrl variable too if you want -
it('clicks on the Home button', function(){
homeTopBanner.homeButton.click();
browser.getCurrentUrl().then(function(url) {
expect(url).toEqual(homeTopBanner.homeUrl);
});
})
There could also be another issue when after the click action the previous url is being captured due to the fact that protractor is async and fast. In that case you can write your getCurrentUrl() function inside the promise that click() function returns. Here's an example of it -
it('clicks on the Home button', function(){
homeTopBanner.homeButton.click().then(function(){
browser.getCurrentUrl().then(function(url) {
expect(url).toEqual(homeTopBanner.homeUrl);
});
});
})
Hope this helps.