On Oct 20, 2007, at 5:34 am, Scott Taylor wrote: > As I see it, the problem is that ActiveRecord is not like a typical > library, which is completely external. With rails, > ActiveRecord::Base (and co) *become* your code.
Surely the implication is that the only way to thoroughly spec an ActiveRecord::Base subclass would be to have shared specs available for the full behaviour of Base and it_should_behave_like them into your own specs? As it happens, I use very little inheritance so possibly there is a better way to handle this. > Of course, if you wanted to split up your specs into specs/, stories/ > and assumptions/, you would certainly be free to. I have used assumption specs before, to test things in Rails views that were not mockable, but I put them immediately before the specs on my modifications. They are there to flag the thing that needs fixing. If I felt the need to have an assumption spec folder, I'd start feeling like there was something fundamentally wrong that needed a more decisive solution, like switching to a new framework... > Following up on the last idea: One thing that I don't think is yet > widely understood is that there is no such thing as a "unit" or > "integration" test - test happen on a continuum (the classification > of a test is not a black and white sort of thing). I'm glad someone said that. For a couple of months now I've been struggling to define "unit test" and "integration test". I realised not long ago that to thoroughly test an app with a reasonably complex object model could easily have 5-10 layers of testing. Each one would extend the black box from individual objects and messages, right up firing it off on the command line / web server / whatever and testing the output. Most of these would be brittle and semi- redundant, but they would tell you *exactly* where your app was going wrong. Ashley -- blog @ http://aviewfromafar.net/ linked-in @ http://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleymoran currently @ home _______________________________________________ rspec-users mailing list rspec-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
