There isn't a way to do this with capybara and CSS. I've used XPath in the past to accomplish this goal though, which does have a way to get the parent element and is supported by Capybara:
find(:xpath, '//*[@id="some_button"]/..').fill_in "Name:", :with => name
I really found jamuraa's answer helpful, but going for full xpath gave me a nightmare of a string in my case, so I happily made use of the ability to concatenate find's in Capybara, allowing me to mix css and xpath selection. Your example would then look like this:
find('#some_button').find(:xpath,".//..").fill_in "Name:", :with => name
Capybara 2.0 update: find(:xpath,".//..") will most likely result in an Ambiguous match error. In that case, use first(:xpath,".//..") instead.
If you stumbled across this trying to figure out how to find any parent (as in ancestor) node (as hinted at in @vrish88's comment on @Pascal Lindelauf's answer):
I needed to find an ancestor with a css class, though it was indeterminate if it the target ancestor had one or more css classes present, so I didn't see a way to make a deterministic xpath query. I worked this up instead:
def find_ancestor_with_class(field, cssClass)
ancestor = field
loop do
ancestor = ancestor.find(:xpath, '..')
break if ancestor.nil?
break if ancestor.has_css? cssClass
end
ancestor
end
Warning: use this sparingly, it could cost you a lot of time in tests so make sure the ancestor is just a few hops away.
If the dynamically generated input does come attached with an id element (be careful with these though as in angular, they are wont to change based on adding and deleting elements) it would be something like this: