Rspec test fails

Ok, now I have to ask. I am doing exercise 9.9 from the RoR tutorial
(3.2).

I have this rspec/capybara test to make sure that admin user cannot
delete
him/herself:

subject { page }
. . .
describe “as admin user” do
let(:admin) { FactoryGirl.create(:admin) }
before { sign_in admin }
describe “submitting a DELETE request to the Users#destroy action”
do
before { delete user_path(admin) }
specify { response.should redirect_to(root_path) }
# cannot get the following test to work, even though in browser
it
works
# it { should have_selector(‘div.alert.alert-error’) }
end
end

The test works otherwise ok, but the commented-out line fails when it
shouldn’t. I verified in browser that the flash error message does in
fact
appear - here is the html (hope the html entities for greater-than and
less-than will be parsed in the following):

<div class="alert alert-error">Admin cannot destroy 

him/herself.</div>

Does this have to do with the fact that the server response involves
redirect? How could this be fixed? I can live without this test, but I
may
need the info later.

  • Jussi

Redirect ends current request and starts a new one, so you are right
that
that’s the case (another action isn’t called nor its template rendered).
But shouldn’t you also test that admin user is still there (wasn’t
deleted)
after redirect happened? You could have very easily have him deleted in
your actual code and still redirect to root_path, making this spec pass
incorrectly.

2013/3/28 Jussi H. [email protected]

On Thursday, March 28, 2013 4:06:09 PM UTC+2, Dihital wrote:

Redirect ends current request and starts a new one, so you are right that
that’s the case (another action isn’t called nor its template rendered).

That left me pondering, why does it matter that a new request is
started.
Anyway, it seems that rspec tests can verify that a redirect to a given
path occurs, but there is no way to evaluate the contents of the
resulting
page:

Maybe someone can verify that this is the case, or tell me otherwise?

But shouldn’t you also test that admin user is still there (wasn’t
deleted) after redirect happened? You could have very easily have him
deleted in your actual code and still redirect to root_path, making this
spec pass incorrectly.

A good idea, yes, but that I left for the future.

  • Jussi

On Friday, March 29, 2013 7:32:36 AM UTC, Jussi H. wrote:

page:

testing - Rspec - Rails - How to follow a redirect - Stack Overflow

Maybe someone can verify that this is the case, or tell me otherwise?

That sounds like they’re talking about rspec controller specs (which are
designed to spec a single request to a controller) rather than rspec
request specs which are designed to do a series of requests (and which
I’m
not sure existed back in 2010).

Make sure that you are actually doing a request spec (is the file in
/spec/requests), and as some of the answers on that page mention,
automatic
redirect following differs across capybara drivers.

Fred