I'm currently taking a Rails project management app I built when learning Rails and adding specs to it. During the course of building the app the requirement that project should be archiveable was added. So a project is in one of two states active or archived.
This led to the creation of the following methods: Project.active_projects Project.archived_projects @project.active? @project.archived? @project.archive! @project.unarchive! The current implementation of this is using a separate table of "visibilities" as follows: # Implementation 1 (Current) Tables: Project id name visibility_status_id 1 ActiveProject 1 1 ArchivedProject 2 VisibilityStatuses id name 1 Live 2 Archived But the same behavior could be implemented using a datetime column as follows: # Implementation 2 Tables: Project id name archived_at 1 ActiveProject null 1 ArchivedProject 2007-07-29:18:57 Or in fact numerous other ways e.g. # Implementation 3 Army of cows: Each cow represents a project, the cows wear one of two hats to indicate the active/archived status of the project they represent. ...and so on. It's my understanding that model specs (and specs in general) should be shielded from the implementation details, so how do i check that Project.active_projects only returns active projects without looking at assuming something about the implementation? My initial thought is to check each of them using one of the other exposed methods above, in this case... Project.active_projects.all? {|p| p.active? } but then i can't work out how to spec all the other methods without going round in circles so that each spec would end up assuming that the other methods work (in this case that p.active? is working) or worse resorting to peeking at implementation details. Russell Tracey _______________________________________________ rspec-users mailing list rspec-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users