>
> I come from the same background as you, so I hear where you're coming
> from. We made a conscious decision, however, not to support custom
> messages almost two years ago and I'm not sure if its ever even come
> up before. If it has, it was a long time ago.
[nod] Perhaps as I get into the mindset, I'll find this desire slips away.
If you follow the conventions of one expectation per example, and your
> example is well named, this is less of a problem. Here's a common
> idiom:
>
> describe Person do
> def valid_attributes
> {:name => 'joe smith'}
> end
> before(:each) do
> @person = Person.new(valid_attributes)
> end
> it "should be valid with valid attributes" do
> @person.should be_valid
> end
> it "should be invalid with no name" do
> @person.name = nil
> @person.should_not be_valid
> end
> end
Using this as an example, if a new validation rule is added, this test will
fail without indicating /why/. Sure, I can get that answer in other ways,
but I'd hate to discover things like:
it "should be valid with valid attributes" do
# puts @person.errors if [EMAIL PROTECTED]
@person.should be_valid
end
(Which I've seen when people have to repeatedly diagnose issues in a test;
I'd prefer a failure message to the above)
Together, these different examples help to tell the whole story, and
> when one example fails you know why it's failing - its just that the
> message is in the example's name instead of a custom assertion
> message.
Make sense?
Yes and no; test isolation and good names is a decent practice even in
XUnit, but clearly it's that much stronger in RSpec, and I'm in favour of
that. However, I find that often test failures involve unexpected changes (
e.g. the REST service didn't return a status code of 201, as you expected,
because a validation rule changed and the validation failed), which aren't
as easy to message.
Still, i'm willing to give this approach a shot and see if this bothers me
increasingly less.
- Geoffrey
--
Geoffrey Wiseman
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