Comments on: (My) RSpec best practices and tips

By: Phil

Phil — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 15:05:14 +0000

Thanks for tips sharing!

By: Philippe Creux

Philippe Creux — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 10:56:46 +0000

Thanks Jack! You can use a combination of subject and its for the output to make more sense.

subject { @obj }

its(:field1) { should == 37 }
its(:filed2) { should == 19 }

Also, if your object is an ActiveRecord model, you could use set which is available as a gem. Cheers

By: Jack Repenning

Jack Repenning — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 02:03:11 +0000

All great stuff, made my life 10x better in 2 minutes!

I still have one thorny problem, though. Have any thoughts?

My spec is testing code that creates a large object, 110 fields, with a lot of complex interrelationships. With your help, I got to this form:

describe “the object” do
before(:all) do
@obj = expensively_create_the_object
end
it “should exist” { @obj.should_not == nil }
it “should have proper field1″ { @obj.field1.should == 37 }
it “should have proper field2″ { @obj.field2.should == 19 }
…
end

I tried

specify { @obj.field2.should == 37 }
specify { @obj.field2.should == 19 }
…

which is more readable, but the test output says I pass or fail stuff like:

should == nil
should == nil
should == 3
should == “Demo”
should not == nil
should == nil

Is there any way to get specify to name the tested field?

By: Andrey

Andrey — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 08:46:57 +0000

Thank you for post! In code:


context "when valid" do
    it "should return 'January' for 1" # lower boundary
    it "should return 'March' for 3"
    it "should return 'December' for 12" # upper boundary

you missed end keyword.

By: Ryan Cheung

Ryan Cheung — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 01:37:29 +0000

It has been 2 years since this post published. And it’s still very helpful for us. Thank you!

By: Jason Woodlee

Jason Woodlee — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:23:02 +0000

awesome.. didnt know 1/2 of these tricks..

By: RAYMUNDO

RAYMUNDO — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 10:16:06 +0000

Hello. This is a tweet. Using twitter API for ios

By: Marco Perrando

Marco Perrando — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 09:44:42 +0000

I’ve discovered that you can use “subject” to modify your object under test in the before blocks, avoiding the reduntant blocks in wich you define a @user and set it as the subject.
So you can shorten even more your test to
describe User do context "when name empty" do it { should not be_valid } specify { subject.save.should == false } end


  context "when name not empty" do

    before { subject.name = 'Sam' }
    it { should be_valid }

    specify { subject.save.should == true }

  end
  describe :present do

    subject { subject.present }
    context "when user is a W" do

      before { subject.gender = 'W' }
      it { should be_a Flower }

    end
    context "when user is a M" do

      before { subject.gender = 'M' }

it { should be_an IMac } end end end

By: Bogdan Gusiev

Bogdan Gusiev — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:05:00 +0000

That is a good start with all set of rspec features. And in addition you may combine context, subject and let and receive completely new opportunities.

Good example of what you can do: http://gusiev.com/dorspec/#24

By: JDK

JDK — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:25:50 +0000

Very interesting things–learned a lot from this, so thanks! I’m left with a question though–what do you see wrong with verbosity? I’ve never had a problem with verbosity. My feeling is that if the code is verbose, without impacting performance, it is easier for other who have to deal with it to understand it.