Survey: roles in controller specs

Testing RSpec
1

I have a bit of a question on how people are organizing their controller
specs, once you take user roles into account. I’m not entirely sure
that
I’ve found a way to do it that feels “natural” to me.

So, say I’ve got a controller that I want to ensure is locked down to a
particular set of users. I can’t decide how the layer the
describes/contexts:

describe PostsController do

context “as a normal user” do
before { logged_in }
describe “POST create” do
it “is forbidden” do
post :create, :post => {}
response.should be_forbidden
end
end

… Other specs …

end

context “as an editor” do
before { logged_in.with_role :editor }

describe "POST create" do
   ...
end

end

This is the direction that the flow of the language seems right to me,
when
it’s dumped in the specdocs – “PostsController, as a normal user POST
create is forbidden”, but from another standpoint, it breaks up the
specification of a single method into a couple of different locations in
the
file, and may require duplicating quite a bit of setup.

How does everyone else deal with this?

2

Chris F. wrote:

I have a bit of a question on how people are organizing their controller
specs, once you take user roles into account. I’m not entirely sure
that I’ve found a way to do it that feels “natural” to me.

This is the direction that the flow of the language seems right to me,
when it’s dumped in the specdocs – “PostsController, as a normal user
POST create is forbidden”, but from another standpoint, it breaks up the
specification of a single method into a couple of different locations in
the file, and may require duplicating quite a bit of setup.

How does everyone else deal with this?

I tend to organize these specs by permissions, not roles. Instead of
checking what a normal user can do or an editor can do, I simply assume
that everyone can create a post (no spec required) except those who
should not be permitted, for which I write a spec. All my authorization
specs are of the form " is not permitted to do " and I
organize them by action.