View specs - best practices

Testing RSpec
1

Howdy,

I’m trying to test some mailer views (which is no different to normal
views in terms of specs)… ran into the following problem…

In adherence to the “one expectation per ‘spec’”… I’m trying to
write the following

describe “auth/mailer/signup.html.erb” do
before(:each) do
@user = Factory.build(:user)
assign(:user, @user)
render
end

subject { rendered }

it { should include(@user.email) }
it { should…
it { should…
end

Before long, if you keep this up, your spec goes from quick to very
slow. Turns out, calling render takes a bit of effort and the
before(:each) tells rspec to call render before each “it” call.

SO… is there a way to cache this, so that the rendered output is
available to each spec to avoid re-rendering? Each “it” item, really
describes expectations on the output, which doesn’t change for every
run.

I could default back down to a single it, but that would defeat the
purpose of writing small tests.

I’ve tried before(:all), but rspec doesn’t like it. It generates the
following error:

Failure/Error: render
NoMethodError:
undefined method `example_group’ for nil:NilClass

Cheers,
Jason

2

+1, interested in the solution as well. We have the same issue with
controller specs/Shoulda, e.g.:

describe ‘GET google_apps (with invalid credentials)’ do
before do
…
get :google_apps
end

 it { should respond_with(:ok) }
 it { should render_template("sessions/new") }
 it { should set_the_flash.to(/Could not authorize you from Google

Apps because/) }
end

Will call the controller code 3 times without any particular reason to.
Probably some caching could be added in Shoulda?