Using Twitter Typeahead with Capybara

I ran into a situation where I need to test a typeahead autocomplete field. For some reason the interaction with the autocomplete field does not show suggestions. I have searched for a solution, and almost all of them involved the execution of some sort of scripts using Capybara.

The solution I am using right now, is to create a typedown event, and to fire the event after set the value using the typeahead API.

      def fill_in_auto_complete(selector, value)
        create_event = "var e = $.Event('keydown', { keyCode: 40 })"
        type_text = "$('#{selector}').typeahead('val', '#{value}')"
        trigger_event = "$('#{selector}').trigger(e)"
        page.execute_script %Q{ #{create_event}; #{type_text}; #{trigger_event};}
      end

I think it's a little hackish, but it will do the job for now.

Source: typeahead.js/issues/798