Inability to determine reason for invisibility

Current behavior:

Per v3.8.0, one might receive a message stating EG. Cypress could not determine why this element '<button>' is not visible.

This is non-sensical, as there’s obviously some heuristic implemented that has determined the element to be invisible.

I understand that there’s a method getReasonIsHidden that is somewhat replicating the behavior of isHidden, but returning a human-readable string instead of a boolean value. I am however having a very hard time understanding why you would implement it like this.

Since there should be one, and only one, heuristic-implemention, why not make one a function of the other?

const getReasonIsHidden = function ($el) {
  // Implementation ...
}

const isHidden = ($el) => {
  return !!getReasonIsHidden($el);
}

Desired behavior:

Never to see such a non-informative error message.

Steps to reproduce: (app code and test code)

Doesn’t really matter here, but I can see if I can produce a minimal example.

Versions

Cypress v3.8.0, Arch Linux, Chrome 77.

[badeball]

Here’s an example of what I mean by sharing heuristic, without changing the current interface.

function determineVisibility ($el) {
  if ( /* some condition */ ) {
    return {
      visible: false,
      reason: "foobar"
    };
  }

  return {
    visible: true
  };
}

export function isHidden ($el) {
  return !determineVisibility($el).visible;
}

export function getReasonIsHidden ($el) {
  const visibility = determineVisibility($el);

  if (visibility.visible) {
    throw new Error("Erroneously invoked on a visible element");
  }

  return visibility.reason;
}

[jennifer-shehane]

Yah, there’s a larger issue to evaluate our error messages - showing why something is invisible or visible here: https://github.com/cypress-io/cypress/issues/677

As far as I have seen, there aren’t any open issues of a situation where the ambiguous error ‘could not determine why’ is showing for anyone in the current version.