Hello, everyone. I’ve been lurking here for a while, but this is my
first post.
I think I’ve run into a RSpec bug in a Rails project I’m working on. I
was working on a few REST controllers, and started getting failures on
a specific spec that verified whether a certain action returned XML
output. I spent quite a lot of time checking my code to see if it was
something I did wrong, but it works when I test it manually.
So I created an empty Rails app, and wrote the bare minimum of code
necessary to reproduce this problem. I’m using Rails 2.1.1, with
rspec-1.1.8 and rspec-rails-1.1.8, all installed as gems.
I started by creating a dead-simple model with two string attributes
and no validations, along with this fixture:
spec/fixtures/users.yml
one:
name: Name
email: email
Then I created a simple controller, and its corresponding spec.
class UsersController < ApplicationController
def index
respond_to do |format|
format.xml { render :xml => User.find(:all).to_xml}
end
end
end
spec
require File.expand_path(File.dirname(FILE) + ‘/…/spec_helper’)
describe UsersController do
fixtures :users
it “should return a XML user list” do
get :index, :format => :xml
response.body.should == User.find(:all).to_xml
end
end
It all looks straightforward enough - I use the same call on both the
controller and the spec, so the two results should indeed be the same.
However, when I run the spec I get this failure:
‘UsersController should return a XML user list’ FAILED
expected: “<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<users
type="array">\n \n <created-at
type="datetime">2008-10-20T11:24:28Z\n
email\n <id type="integer">953125641\n
Name\n <updated-at
type="datetime">2008-10-20T11:24:28Z\n
\n\n”,
got: " " (using ==)
./spec/controllers/users_controller_spec.rb:10:
/usr/lib64/ruby/1.8/timeout.rb:53:in `timeout’
Finished in 0.256981 seconds
This happens both when using “rake spec” and when running only that
spec file. Firing up the app and accessing localhost:3000/users.xml
returns the correct result. In the “real” project, it’s even weirder:
the “expected” site of the assertion shows a string composed of the
XML out put concatenated to itself, and the “got” side has the correct
output. Something like “Expected ‘aa’ but got ‘a’”.
What could the problem be? Is it really a RSpec bug, or is it
something I did wrong?
–
Bira
