change to locator function breaks a lot of selectors

The change of #1829 breaks a lot of selectors.

For example my universal td selector

locate('td')
       .withText(text)
       .at(columnNumber)
       .inside(
         this.tableRows(tableId)
           .withText(text)
           .at(_rowNumber)
       )

Puppeteer throws this exception: “Uncaught DOMException: Failed to execute … is not a valid XPath expression.” Reason: Brackets aren’t allowed in a “ancestor”-selector. //*[ancestor::(//*)[1]]

By the way removePrefix does not work for those kind of selectors as well.

_Originally posted by @nitschSB in https://github.com/Codeception/CodeceptJS/pull/1829#issuecomment-523952794_

Since I don’t really understand what problem exactly this PR solves, I opened this ticket to discuss the change. At least to me it feels like it introduces more problem than it solves.

[nitschSB]

It’s broken, when you use at, first or last in conjunction with find, withChild, withDescendant, inside, after or before.

The documentation of the Locator Builder API is a little sketchy. locate('//tr/td').at(2); may lead to //tr/td[position()=2] or (//tr/td)[position()=2]. I don’t know what to expect and what you want. I thing someone should decide quickly because it’s an API breaking change.

[mirao]

I’ve just upgraded CodeceptJS to 2.3.x and I can see a regression.

The code locate("div").at(2).withAttr({ role: "row" }).withText("Line 1") is translated this way:

• ver 2.2.1 as .//div[position()=2][@role = 'row'][contains(., 'Line 1')] which works
• ver. 2.3.0 as (.//div)[position()=2][@role = 'row'][contains(., 'Line 1')] which doesn’t work (tested in Chrome/Firefox)

It works well only without at(2)

As a workaround I had to adjust the locator a little bit. I replaced at(2) by one more attribute to narrow the locator:

• locate("div").withAttr({ "aria-rowindex": "2" }).withAttr({ role: "row" }).withText("Line 1")