Depot test-driven development exercise

Rails
1

(I posted this yesterday but within 20 minutes my thread was hijacked
so I’m not sure anyone really saw this.)

I’ve been working my way through the Agile book and just completed
the depot sample application. I learned quite a bit along the way.

On page 171 we are led through the creation of a test (that fails)
for new code. The new code (a search function) is left as an exercise
for the reader. Well, I think I solved it but I’m not sure I did it
the “Rails way” (even though it passes the test).

After much experimentation, here’s what I did:

  1. Edit the depot/app/controller/search_controller.rb file:

class SearchController < ApplicationController

def search
@query = String.new(params[:query])
@products = Product.find(:all,
:conditions => “title like ‘%#{@query}
%’ OR
description like ‘%#{@query}%’”)

 flash[:notice] = "Found #{@products.size} product(s)."

end

end

  1. cp depot/app/views/layout/store.rhtml depot/app/views/layout/
    search.rhtml

  2. cp depot/app/views/store/index.rhtml depot/app/views/search/
    search.rhtml

  3. Edit depot/app/views/search/search.rhtml
    Add in another set of

    tags around it so we have as the outermost one. It now looks like:
    <% @products.each do |product| %>

    <%= h product.title %>

    <%= product.description %> <%= fmt_dollars(product.price) %> <%= link_to 'Add to Cart', {:action => 'add_to_cart', :id => product }, :class => 'addtocart' %>
     
    <% end %>

    <%= link_to “Show my cart”, :action => “display_cart” %>

    1. Change the test so it does “assert_template ‘search/search’”
      instead of “assert_template ‘search/results’”.

    2. There is no step six.

    Was there a better or easier way of accomplishing this task?

    Also, why did the book want to test “assert_template ‘search/
    results’”? That seems like an error to me. The default view for a
    controller’s method (action) has the same name as the action, right?
    Unless you do a “redirect_to :action => ‘results’” in which case the
    “assert_response :success” would now fail because we are redirecting
    to a page with a different name. This really confused me and caused
    me to flail around much longer than necessary to solve this problem.

    Or is the test correct and I can have an action named “search”
    rendered by a view named “results”?

    cr