You may be asking yourself why you’d want to do this in the first place. Well here’s why I would want to do it.

We had some Webdriver based Cucumber tests that passed fine locally but kept failing on our CI box. Our CI box is a bit underpowered at the moment so I thought what might be happening is that our tests weren’t waiting long enough for the Ajaxy stuff to happen because the Ajax responses were taking a long time.

After some poking around in the source code of jQuery, I found the $.active property. This property keeps track of the number of active Ajax requests that are going on and I thought this might help us out.

What I came up with was this gist:

I added this step right after my Cucumber step that caused the Ajax call so that Cucumber would wait to move on until I knew that everything was done.

This step solved our CI failures and all was good in our test suite again.