On 2011-08-25 7:04 AM, David Chelimsky wrote:
On Aug 23, 2011, at 5:02 AM, foreverman wrote:
Hey,
I am using rspec (1.3.0) and rspec-rails (1.3.2) for my current rails2
project, I found that in my controller test, rspec doesn't check the
existence of view template. For example,
it "should render show template" do
get :show
response.should render_template :show
end
The above controller test will pass even the 'show' template doesn't
exist.
I am curious if this is a bug or I did something wrong.
Neither. There's a bit of history here so bear with me.
The names used in Rails for the different kinds of tests it offers do not align with the
names we used to use before Rails came along. Here are some older definitions (which are
the ones to which I subscribe, but that doesn't mean "they are the right ones"):
Unit test: specifies behavior of an object in isolation.
Integration test: specifies behavior of two or more objects in which there are
at least two bits of non-trivial behavior.
Functional test: specifies how the application behaves (from a user
perspective, or close facsimile)
System test: specifies how a system of applications behave
These each cover progressively wider scope: unit, integration, functional,
system.
Based on that nomenclature, what Rails calls unit, functional, and integration
tests are really integration (model + db), integration (mvc + db), and
functional tests (mvc + db + routing/sessions).
The rspec-rails gem aims to support the more traditional scopes by offering unit tests for controllers and views. This is what
you've come up against: a controller spec is intended to be a unit test for the controller. To support this, rspec-rails (1.x)
does not actually render any views at all. If the spec says the controller should render "foo/bar", and the controller
renders "foo/bar", then the example passes whether or not the view exists. In a BDD process, we work from the
outside-in, so before the controller spec exists, there would be a failing "integration spec" (which were called that
to align with Rails' nomenclature in rspec-rails-1, but are called "request specs" in rspec-rails-2 - perhaps we should
really call these "functional specs", but that might just make things more confusing). That serves two purposes: it
describes the behavior from a user perspective (when I submit this form with valid data, then xyz happens), and it also provides
test coverage that pro
ve
s that the isolated parts specified in model, view, controller, and helper
specs all play nice together.
If you prefer to treat controller specs as Rails functional tests (which are mvc + db integration
specs, but not functional tests since they bypass the router (sort of) and sessions (sort of)), you
can tell rspec-rails-1 to render views with the "integrate_views" declaration
("render_views" in rspec-rails-2):
# globally
Spec::Runner::configure do |c|
c.integrate_views
end
or
# for one spec
describe ThingsController do
integrate_views
...
end
HTH,
David
Just throwing out my own experience with this issue.
I tried the integrate_views approach, but then had to mock so much stuff
so the view wouldn't generate errors it became an incredible burden. But
I still wanted to know that I was rendering the right view at the right
time. I came up with something that is simple, albeit a bit verbose:
In the controller, I explicitly call render (meaning, I don't let Rails
magic happen):
def index
render :index
end
Then in the controller test, I set an expectation:
describe 'get index' do
it 'should render the index template' do
controller.should_receive(:render).with(:index)
get :index
end
end
Phillip
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