Issue with getting Behat test to find "Search" input that is injected into page by jQuery datatables plugin - behat

Question

The following HTML is inserted into a page by the jQuery Datatables plugin:
<label>Search:
<input type="search" class="" placeholder="" aria-controls="datatable-1">
</label>
The existing Behat test I have, which will not pass:
Given I am on "/courses"
And I fill in "Search" with "course"
The resulting error is:
Form field with id|name|label|value|placeholder "Search" not found.
I have tried the following:
Updating the And to And I fill in "Search:" with "course"
Adding variations of a wait When I wait for "Search:" to appear (timeout in 60 seconds)
Adding variation of a wait When I wait for "[type='search']" (timeout in 60 seconds)
This scenario opens up Firefox and I can see the label "Search:" and the search box.
What do I need to do to get this test to pass?

Answer 1

Behat's I fill in "field" with "value" command is awfully slow, I tend to not use it for this reason.
In this case the label matching is probably not working because of the whitespace around the label text. It's expecting an exact text match, but the extra whitespace is throwing it off.
You can avoid using this function with something like the following:
$this->getSession()->getPage()->find('css', 'input[type=search]')->setValue('course');
If the element is not available when the page loads, you will need to wait for it. I note that you mention that waiting for the label text times out, so you should check to see if the element you're interested in is inside an iframe. In this case, you need to use the switchToIFrame command before selenium can interact with the elements inside the iframe.
For example:
//Switch to iframe with id 'iframeID'
$this->getSession()->switchToIFrame('iframeID');
//Do some stuff with the elements contained in the iframe.
//Switch back to parent iframe.
$this->getSession()->switchToIFrame(null);
One more thing to note is that if there is a hierarchy of iframes, you need to switch one level at a time.