Writing Page-specific Custom Commands

You can add custom commands to your page object using the commands property. This is a useful way to encapsulate logic about the page that would otherwise live in a test, or multiple tests.

Nightwatch will call the command on the context of the page or section. Client commands like pause are available via this.api. For chaining, each function should return the page object or section.

In this case, a command is used to encapsulate logic for clicking the submit button:

const googleCommands = {
  submit: function() {
    this.api.pause(1000);
    

    return this.waitForElementVisible('@submitButton', 1000)
      .click('@submitButton')
      .waitForElementNotPresent('@submitButton');
  }
};


module.exports = {
  commands: [googleCommands],
  elements: {
    searchBar: {
      selector: 'input[type=text]'
    },
    submitButton: {
      selector: 'input[name=btnK]'
    }
  }
};

Then the test is simply: 
module.exports = {
  'Test': function (browser) {
    var google = browser.page.google();
    google.setValue('@searchBar', 'nightwatch')
      .submit();
    

    browser.end();
  }
};

Class-based page commands

From Nightwatch 2 it is also possible to export the page commands as an ES6 class.

Here's a basic example:

module.exports = class {
  basicCommand() {
    return {
      basicResult: 'from-helper-class'
    };
  }
  

  dropdownSelect() {
    return this;
  }
  

  dropdownSelectByText() {
    return this;
  }
  

  name() {
    return this;
  }
};

And for a more elaborate example... You can referrence the main page object via this.page. The class will be instantiated automatically, you don't need to do anything else besides writing it:

module.exports = class RealCommands {
  customFindElements(selector, callback = function(r) {return r}) {
    return this.page.findElements({
      selector,
      suppressNotFoundErrors: true
    }, function(result) {
      return callback(result ? result.value: []);
    });
  }
  

  async customFindElementsES6(selector) {
    const result = await this.page.findElements({
      selector,
      suppressNotFoundErrors: true
    });
    

    return result;
  }
};