Entries Tagged 'rspec' ↓

Reuse Given Scenarios with GivenScenario in RSpec StoryRunner

Update: I’ve made some improvements upon this using WebRat that you can read all about here.

I’m having a great time with RSpec‘s new StoryRunner, and wanted to share a bit of what you can do with it. I learn very well from examples and I know many others do as well so I hope that this provides as a useful resource for getting your ideas flowing on how to use StoryRunner for your own projects.

To start, I set up a simple project using the following

# Create the project
rails blog
cd blog

# Install Restful Authentication
script/plugin install http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/restful_authentication/
script/generate authenticated user sessions

# Create a Post model
script/generate scaffold post title:string body:text published:boolean

Now I have the essentials for a simple app to play with. Of course you’ll also want to install RSpec.

Now to try out StoryRunner! I’ll write a story to cover the login system. No need to write Spec’s for it, it’s already well tested. However in writing this story we get a reusable Scenario that will be nice to have later, as well as give us a nice starting point for stories.

require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), "helper")

Story "User Stuff", %{
  As a writer
  I want to be a member
  So that I can make posts
}, :type => RailsStory do
  
  Scenario "I log in as a new user" do

    Given("that I am not logged in") do
      delete "/sessions/destroy"
      controller.should_not be_logged_in
      
      @user_count = User.count
    end

    When("I create a new user", "Glenn") do |name|
      @user = User.create(:login => name, 
            :email => "#{name}@glennfu.com", :password => name, 
            :password_confirmation => name)
    end

    Then("there should be 1 more user stored") do
      User.count.should == @user_count + 1
    end

    When("I login as", "Glenn") do |name|
     post "/sessions/create", :login => name, :password => name
    end
    
    Then("I should be logged in") do
      controller.should be_logged_in
      response.should be_redirect
    end
  end
end

This should be pretty easy to follow. I start by logging out, then creating a user and logging in with it. This is runnable with ruby stories/user_story.rb

Now that this is already written, we can easily add similar stories. Notice that we don’t have to re-define our steps here:

Scenario "I log in with the wrong user/password" do

  Given "that I am not logged in"
  When "I create a new user", "Glenn"
  Then "there should be 1 more user stored"
  When "I login as", "JoeBob"
  
  Then "I should not be logged in" do
    controller.should_not be_logged_in
    response.should_not be_redirect
  end
end

Now I’ll write a story for our Posts. Notice the usage of “GivenScenario”, very cool!

Scenario "Create a new post while logged in" do

  GivenScenario "I log in as a new user"

  Then "I should be able to make a post" do
    post "/posts/create", :post => {:title => "the title", 
            :body => "The body!"}
    
    @post = Post.find_by_title("the title")
    
    flash[:notice].should == "Post was successfully created."
    @post.should_not be_nil
    response.should be_redirect
  end
end

What if I want to also test posts failing? I’ll modify the previous step to be a bit more robust (and also more useful).

Then "I $should be able to make a post", "should" do |should|
  post "/posts/create", :post => {:title => "my title", 
            :body => "The body!"}
  
  @post = Post.find_by_title("my title")
  
  if should == "should"
    flash[:notice].should == "Post was successfully created."
    @post.should_not be_nil
  else
    flash[:notice].should be_nil
    @post.should be_nil
  end
  response.should be_redirect
end

With this change, I can easily add a new Scenario to test when making posts should fail:

Scenario "Create a new post while not logged in" do
  Given "that I am not logged in" 
  Then "I $should be able to make a post", "should not"
end

I hope you found this useful!

Overriding Time.now to Control the Server Time

I just recently worked on a project in which I needed to modify what time the Ruby on Rails server thought it was. I was able to change this very easily with the help of court3nay while on #rubyonrails.

def Time.now
  Time.parse("2010-02-30", nil)
end

With this I am able to change the server time whenever I want! The system was one in which user interface capabilities changed at different times of the month. Obviously I didn’t want to wait 20 days to see something different!

I placed this code snippet in my config/environments/development.rb file so that everything in my application could access it, and it wouldn’t affect the test or production environments. The only downside to this is that you have to restart the server in order to change the time. Of course, in RoR this takes like 5 seconds so it was no big deal for me.

In my specs I used stuff like

date = "2008-01-01"
Time.stub!(:now).and_return(Time.parse(date))

which of course made it very easy to write effective specs that covered all of my functionality. Thank you RSpec!

Voila, now you too can control time!!

Autotest crashes using RedGreen

At the time of this posting, the latest gem release of RedGreen has a bug. For those of you who don’t know, RedGreen is a handy tool to make specs/unit tests color according to the result of the test to make your testing output much easier to read. Unfortunately, at the time of this posting, the latest gems (Autotest, RedGreen, Ruby on Rails, RSpec) have an issue trying to play nicely together.

RedGreen actually will cause Autotest to crash when one of the following happens

  • You save your code with a compile error (eg. missing ‘end’ tag)
  • You add new spec files

The error looks like this:

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/ZenTest-3.6.1/lib/autotest/redgreen.rb:8: undefined method `match' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)

and will follow the compile error from your code, then stop autotest.

I posted a comment for the original author, Pat Eyler, and the comment was manually approved, but I haven’t received any actual response to know whether or not it will be updated. Just in case it won’t be, I hope this simple fix is useful for you.

To fix this problem, open up your

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/ZenTest-3.6.1/lib/autotest/redgreen.rb

file and change line 8 from:

if at.results.last.match(/^.* (\d+) failures, (\d+) errors$/)

to

if at.results.last && at.results.last.match(/^.* (\d+) failures, (\d+) errors$/)

Very simple, and it does the trick!