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Visited page leaks between tests

See original GitHub issue

Current behavior

Between tests, if before/beforeEach execute for a long time, the last visited page is still active, and behavior on that page might cause the next test to fail.

Explanation - real world context

We are developing a web app (Next.js) that requires users to log in. We use Auth0 for authentication, and then keep the user’s token in a cookie that is transmitted to the server. In order to make sure the current user’s session is not expired, our app periodically calls an API route that verifies the client’s access token is unexpired. If it is expired, the app redirects the user to the Auth0 login flow to re-login.

Because of Cypress cross-origin limitation, at the beginning of the tests we perform a login through cy.request and keep a signed cookie for the duration of the tests. The cookies get cleared between tests, and we load them into the browser before visiting a page that requires authentication.

Now for the flow:

We have a test that finished running. The browser is still open on the last visited page
Cypress starts running before for the next test. It clears the browser’s cookies
The open web app decides to check if the user’s session is still valid. It sends a request, which fails (because cookies have been cleared). So the web app decides to redirect to Auth0 login form
Cypress errors with a cross-origin problem

Here is a sequence of screenshots:

New test suite if running before, but the previous browser state is still visible.

We got redirected to Auth0.

Desired behavior

I think that when a new test suite starts, the previous state of the browser shouldn’t still be active. And certainly browser actions shouldn’t impact the result of the new test suite.

Test code to reproduce

I created a reproduction in Cypress RWA that shows how the previous page stays loaded if the before block takes a long time to execute.

You can run the test tests/ui/notifications.spec.ts and see what happens when cypress moves from the first describe() block to the second.

https://github.com/adarnon/cypress-before-wait

Versions

Cypress version: 6.9.1, 7.5.0. This error occurred on Ubuntu 20.04, Electron 87. But it also statistically reproduces locally on MacOS Big Sur & Chrome 91.

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 2 years ago
Reactions:1
Comments:14 (6 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

2reactions

jennifer-shehanecommented, Jun 15, 2021

K, I’ve simplified the example where the application can still trigger side effects in the ‘before’ of the next spec.

Reproducible Example

spec.js

describe('tests', () => {
  it('test', () => {
    cy.visit('index.html')
    cy.get('button').click()
  })
})

describe('more tests', () => {
  before(() => {
    cy.wait(10000)
  })

  it('test', () => {
    // we expect to still be on the page 
    // (in real world, maybe still logged into the app)
    cy.url().should('eq', 'index.html')
  })
})

index.html

<html>
<body>
  <button id='button'>Create Side Effect</button>
  <script>
    document.getElementById('button').onclick = () => {
      setTimeout(() => {
        window.location.assign("https://www.google.com")
      }, 5000);
    }
  </script>
</body>
</html>

1reaction

jennifer-shehanecommented, Sep 10, 2021

A workaround for this that I think would work today is a bit sideways, but with our new experimentalSessionSupport feature, Cypress will visit about:blank in between every single test case. I believe that turning this feature on globally (or for the affected spec) may solve this issue. Can anyone try this out and report if this is the case?

Please make sure to read about cy.session and what it does before making those updates.

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