<p>This RSpec tutorial is intended to be an introduction to RSpec for those with little testing experience or Test::Unit testing experience. All RSpec examples in these tutorials are based on version 1.0 syntax.</p> <p>If I intend to build my project from the start using RSpec, I can opt to use the rspec_scaffold instead of scaffold_resource (which will take over scaffold in Rails 2.0).</p> <pre lang="ruby">fr@ivolo.us$ ./script/generate rspec_scaffold post title:string body:text author:integer created_at:datetime updated_at:datetime exists app/models/ exists app/controllers/ exists app/helpers/ create app/views/posts create spec/controllers/ create spec/models/ create spec/helpers/ create spec/fixtures/ create spec/views/posts create spec/controllers/posts_controller_spec.rb create app/controllers/posts_controller.rb create spec/helpers/posts_helper_spec.rb create app/helpers/posts_helper.rb create app/views/posts/index.rhtml create app/views/posts/show.rhtml create app/views/posts/new.rhtml create app/views/posts/edit.rhtml create app/models/post.rb create spec/fixtures/posts.yml create spec/models/post_spec.rb create spec/views/posts/edit.rhtml_spec.rb create spec/views/posts/index.rhtml_spec.rb create spec/views/posts/new.rhtml_spec.rb create spec/views/posts/show.rhtml_spec.rb create db/migrate create db/migrate/001_create_posts.rb route map.resources :posts </pre> <p>As you can see it generated the model, controller, helper, views and all corresponding specs for me. I'll open spec/models/post_spec.rb</p> <pre lang="ruby"># this is called a context (or a describe block) require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../spec_helper' describe Post do before(:each) do @post = Post.new end # this is called an example: it "should be valid" do @post.should be_valid end end </pre> <p>There's something implicit in this spec that's worth pointing out. All specs have a behaviour_type which determines what helper methods are available to you as you build your specs. If we were to specify this explicitly it would change one line:</p> <pre lang="ruby">describe Post, "a useful comment", :behaviour_type => :model do </pre> <p>Right now, this test is pretty useless because the model doesn't do anything, so I'll make it do something really simple:</p> <pre lang="ruby">class Post < ActiveRecord::Base validates_presence_of :title, :body validates_uniqueness_of :title end </pre> <p>Some people consider testing validations to be useless because I can be pretty sure that Rails has already done so. Considering validations are probably the lowest level of architecture in my models, it's a good idea just to verify that they're doing what I think they're doing.</p> <pre lang="ruby">describe Post do before(:each) do @post = Post.new(valid_post_hash) # grabs the hash below end it "should be valid" do @post.should be_valid end it "should not be valid without a title" do @post.title = '' @post.should_not be_valid end it "should not be valid without a body" do @post.body = '' @post.should_not be_valid end def valid_post_hash {:title => 'test', :body => 'test body'} end end </pre> <p>RSpec is not as readable as many would like it to be, but hopefully it's readable enough that I don't need to explain the above. I will mention some optional items that could be put in there:</p> <pre lang="ruby"> before(:all) do # this will be run once before all examples in this describe block end before do # same as before(:each) end after(:each) do # this will be run once after each example @post.destroy unless @post.new_record? end after(:all) do # this will be run once after all examples in this describe block # Useful tasks to put in here are: Post.destroy_all end </pre> 2007-10-04T00:05:05Z 5 rspec-tutorial-part-2-a-simple-test 2007-10-10T02:19:40Z 1