Fixing "expected success? to return true, got false"

I am trying to get the following test to pass, and get this error. Since
I’m
only on day 4 of rspec, I’m sure I’m missing something simple. Any
ideas?

rake spec

‘PatientsController GET ‘new’ should be successful’ FAILED
expected success? to return true, got false
./spec/controllers/patients_controller_spec.rb:27:

patients_controller_spec.rb

require File.expand_path(File.dirname(FILE) + ‘/…/spec_helper’)

describe PatientsController do

integrate_views
fixtures :all

before(:each) do
@user = mock_user
@login_params = { :login => ‘quentin’, :password => ‘monkey’ }
User.stub!(:authenticate).with(@login_params[:login],
@login_params[:password]).and_return(@user)
@user.stub!(:enabled?).and_return(true)
@user.stub!(:account_id).and_return(1)
@user.stub!(:time_zone).and_return(‘Eastern Time (US & Canada)’)
@user.stub!(:role).and_return(‘Normal’)
controller_bypass_authentication(@user)
end

#Delete these examples and add some real ones
it “should use PatientsController” do
controller.should be_an_instance_of(PatientsController)
end

describe “GET ‘new’” do
it “should be successful” do
get ‘new’
response.should be_success # this is the offending line 27
end
end
end

Allows a spec to bypass auth for controllers that filter for logged_in

user
def controller_bypass_authentication(user=nil)
controller.stub!(:logged_in).and_return(true)
controller.stub!(:authorized?).and_return(true)
controller.stub!(:current_user).and_return(user)
end

patients_controller.rb


def new
@patient = Patient.new

respond_to do |format|
format.html # new.html.erb
format.xml { render :xml => @patient }
end
end

http://www.pastie.org/354313

On 7 Jan 2009, at 01:25, Mark A. Richman wrote:

patients_controller_spec.rb

@user  = mock_user

end
response.should be_success # this is the offending line 27

format.html # new.html.erb
format.xml  { render :xml => @patient }

end
end

http://www.pastie.org/354313

I don’t think there’s enough to go on here. We need to know why the
request failed, and it could be for any number of reasons. You’ve
shown us a load of test setup code for stubbing out your
authentication mechanism, but you haven’t shown us the actual
authentication mechanism in your controller, so we have no way of
knowing whether your stubs are good.

I would start your debugging by adding a puts statement between lines
26 and 27 to show more of the (unexpected) response. Looking at
response.code or response.body should give you some clues.

By the way, did you know you can pass hashes of stubs to the mock()
method?

You could clean up your setup code quite a bit by doing this:

@user = mock(User,
:enabled? => true,
:account_id => 1,
:time_zone => ‘Eastern Time (US & Canada)’,
:role => ‘Normal’)

HTH,

Matt W.
http://blog.mattwynne.net

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 6:36 AM, Matt W. [email protected] wrote:

I would start your debugging by adding a puts statement between lines 26 and
27 to show more of the (unexpected) response. Looking at response.code or
response.body should give you some clues.

You can also check the logfiles. I often keep two terminals running
in the background whenever I’m doing BDD coding; one’s running
autospec, and the other one has ‘tail -f log/test.log’. I don’t have
to look at that all the time, but when something breaks and I can’t
figure out why it’s a huge time saver. I also found this post of Ben
Mabey’s to be very useful for figuring out which chunk of log goes
with which spec:

http://www.benmabey.com/2008/07/04/global-setup-in-rspec-or-how-to-add-logging-for-specs/


Have Fun,
Steve E. ([email protected])
ESCAPE POD - The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine
http://www.escapepod.org

Matt,

Thank you very much. It turns out that a pair of
authentication/authorization before_filters were interfering with the
test.
I got past it now by doing this:

before(:each) do
@user = mock_user
@login_params = { :login => ‘quentin’, :password => ‘monkey’ }
User.stub!(:authenticate).with(@login_params[:login],
@login_params[:password]).and_return(@user)
@user.stub!(:enabled?).and_return(true)
@user.stub!(:account_id).and_return(1)
@user.stub!(:time_zone).and_return(‘Eastern Time (US & Canada)’)
@user.stub!(:role).and_return(‘normal’)
User.stub!(:in_role?).with(‘limited’).and_return(false)
controller_bypass_authentication(@user)
end

I’ve got 3 roles in my app (admin, normal, and limited), in case you
were
curious about that. I didn’t know about the hash trick. Thanks!

  • Mark

Steve,

That’s really useful! Thank you.

  • Mark