RSpec, shoulda-matchers and Rails model attributes validations

Testing RSpec
1

I was trying out RSpec framework in a project and got stopped doing the
unit
test of a model. In particular, doing the test for the associations and
the
ActiveRecord validations.
I started writing the validations but my tests didn’t look DRY at all.
Before refactoring the tests checked out and look for other people
solutions.
I found out shoulda-matchers and Shoulda (which if I didn’t get it wrong
is
another testing framework). Actually I found another one, remarkable,
but it
look it doesn’t work with Rails 3.

Does anyone have any advice, comments, suggestion on this matter?

Right now I continue on using RSpec and shoulda-matchers. The last one
mainly for testing the validations and associations of the models.
Any advice and/or help will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

2

On Jul 28, 2011, at 10:22 AM, Piter F. wrote:

I was trying out RSpec framework in a project and got stopped doing the unit
test of a model. In particular, doing the test for the associations and the
ActiveRecord validations.
I started writing the validations but my tests didn’t look DRY at all. Before
refactoring the tests checked out and look for other people solutions.
I found out shoulda-matchers and Shoulda (which if I didn’t get it wrong is
another testing framework). Actually I found another one, remarkable, but it look
it doesn’t work with Rails 3.

Does anyone have any advice, comments, suggestion on this matter?

Right now I continue on using RSpec and shoulda-matchers. The last one mainly
for testing the validations and associations of the models.
Any advice and/or help will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

rspec + shoulda matchers is a fairly common pairing these days, so
you’re not alone.

Personally, I use them for validations (which are behavior), but not for
associations (which are structure). Rather than specifying, for example,
that a team has many players, I just use the players collection in an
example that uses them:

describe Team do
it “does not have any open spots if there are 30 players” do
team = Factory(:team)
30.times { team.players << Factory(:player) }
team.should_not have_opening
end
end

HTH,
David

3

I think that there is a lot of value to projects like shoulda-matchers
(which is separate from shoulda, the testing framework) and
remarkable. The idea is that you should not be testing the framework
(rails). That is, you should not be testing that defining a has_many
association creates a method on your model. You still need to test all
of your domain logic, which David’s example shows.

Also, remarkable does work in rails 3. I am using it because it has a
matcher for accepts_nested_attributes_for, while shoulda-matchers does
not. Using this line in my Gemfile works: gem
‘remarkable_activerecord’, ‘~> 4.0.0.alpha2’

Sam