Undefined method

Testing RSpec
1

Hey Guys,
I am working on my first TDD/BDDD example and running into a problem,
when I run 'ruby app.rb" The app seems to run fine, but when I run
it’s rspec 'spec app_spec.rb" I get a no method defined.

app.rb
require ‘rubygems’
require ‘open-uri’
require ‘hpricot’

class Timer
#this is the retrieve method used to retrieve the contents of the xml
file

def self.retrieve
doc = Hpricot(open(‘some site’))
#get the times
times = doc/"//times"
puts times
end
end

Timer.retrieve - this works fine

rspec
require ‘app’

describe Timer do
it “should retrieve the xml info from the site” do
Timer.should retrieve
end

end

error:
NameError in ‘Timer should retrieve the xml info from the site’
undefined local variable or method `retrieve’ for
#Spec::Example::ExampleGroup::Subclass_1:0xb6dc9c70
./app.rb:7:

Hope that’s clear enough, I am a tad confused about what’s going on,
it looks pretty clear cut.

2

On Jun 28, 2010, at 1:14 PM, bertly_the_coder wrote:

class Timer

end

error:
NameError in ‘Timer should retrieve the xml info from the site’
undefined local variable or method `retrieve’ for
#Spec::Example::ExampleGroup::Subclass_1:0xb6dc9c70
./app.rb:7:

This error tells you that there is no retrieve() method on the example
itself, but the expression “Timer.should retrieve” expects there to be.

Try something like this:

describe Timer do
it “retrieves xml from the site” do
Timer.retrieve.should == “whatever you’re expecting”
end
end

3

Thanks David,

That helps a lot and makes a lot of sense. Neat article by the way,
was following to get a hang on rspec.

Cheers!