After trying to do this the other day, there are a lot of different approaches to doing this. Here’s mine:

Let’s say you have an edit form that has a text input with a value already entered into it.

<input name="name_field" value="Adam Wead" type="text" id="document[name_field]" />

You want to write a test that verifies if the content is already in the input field. Seems easy, but it turns out it’s not so. A lot of the answers out there resorted to using Xpath, which works fine, but you can leverage RSpec’s own finding tools to do this too:

expect(find_field("document[name_field]").value).to eql "Adam Wead"

It avoids XPath, if that’s not your thing, and it’s slightly easier to read. I would have expected (no pun intended) have_value to work, but it doesn’t look like it responds to has_value?.