It's interesting that this thread has started because I just ran into this problem.
The error I got was: NoMethodError in 'Signup she be a valid mac address' protected method `normalize_mac' called for #<Signup:0x408c0434> ./spec/models/signup_spec.rb:10: Here's the spec: describe Signup do before(:each) do @signup = Signup.new end it "she be a valid mac address" do @signup.mac_address = "00-11-22-33-44-55-66" normalized = @signup.normalize_mac(@signup.mac_address) @signup.mac_address.should == normalized end end I have a model that has mac_address attribute. In the before validation, I wanted to make the mac address have colons(:) instead of whatever the user typed in which could have spaces between, dashes, nothing at all. My thought was to just remove all of those special characters validate it against a regex then if it passed the regex check produce the mac address with the colons included. And, if I understand it properly, Pat's statement is saying that I really shouldn't be protecting that method...which would fix my problem. So my question is then, how do you know when to use protected and private or do I just do what Rick suggested and use send? I just realized this isn't really an rspec question...so I'll just move along. Mike B. ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. _______________________________________________ rspec-users mailing list rspec-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users