[Rails] specifying that a layout yields?

Testing RSpec
1

I recently had a bug in a layout due to the layout not calling “yield”
to display the actual content. I wanted to write a spec to describe
what was missing, but it wasn’t obvious how, so I just fixed the
problem first and doubled back to spec it later.

Anyway, the most succinct thing I was able to come up with was the
following:

87246’s gists · GitHub

describe “/layouts/application” do
it “should show the content” do
class << template
attr_accessor :did_render_content
end
template.did_render_content = false
render :inline => “<% self.did_render_content = true
%>”, :layout => ‘application’
template.did_render_content.should be_true
end
end

But I’m not quite satisfied with this, as it’s not as clear and
expressive as specs usually are. I thought I’d write a custom matcher
for it, but it’s not obvious to me what I’d even want the spec to look
like.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Brandt

2

On 29 Mar 2009, at 02:33, Brandt Kurowski wrote:

it “should show the content” do
But I’m not quite satisfied with this, as it’s not as clear and
expressive as specs usually are. I thought I’d write a custom matcher
for it, but it’s not obvious to me what I’d even want the spec to look
like.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Brandt

That’s some pretty nifty code Brandt :slight_smile:

Did you consider testing this aspect of the view’s behaviour from a
higher-level Cucumber acceptance test? I think that’s what I would
have probably done.

Matt W.

http://blog.mattwynne.net

3

On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 9:33 PM, Brandt Kurowski
[email protected] wrote:

it “should show the content” do
But I’m not quite satisfied with this, as it’s not as clear and
expressive as specs usually are. I thought I’d write a custom matcher
for it, but it’s not obvious to me what I’d even want the spec to look
like.

Any ideas?

There’s no need for a custom matcher. You just utilize the :layout
option that render has. e.g. the follow example ensures the layout
renders the content it is given (via a yield block):

describe “layouts/application.html.erb” do
it “should render the context given” do
render :text => “foobar”, :layout => “layouts/application.html.erb”
response.should include_text(“foobar”)
end
end

Thanks,

Brandt

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–
Zach D.
http://www.continuousthinking.com

4

On Mar 30, 9:56 am, Zach D. [email protected] wrote:

 template.did_render_content.should be_true

response.should include_text("foobar")

end
end

Doh! Looks like I was so focused on the mechanism behind the failure
that I ended up writing my spec for the details of the implementation
rather than just the desired behavior. Thanks for pointing out what in
retrospect should’ve been obvious Zach.

Brandt

5

On Mar 30, 3:39 am, Matt W. [email protected] wrote:

On 29 Mar 2009, at 02:33, Brandt Kurowski wrote:

I recently had a bug in a layout due to the layout not calling “yield”
to display the actual content. I wanted to write a spec to describe
what was missing, but it wasn’t obvious how, so I just fixed the
problem first and doubled back to spec it later.

Did you consider testing this aspect of the view’s behaviour from a
higher-level Cucumber acceptance test? I think that’s what I would
have probably done.

Thanks Matt. It was actually a Cucumber feature that found the bug
(this is a new project that I’ve yet to actually open a browser on, I
think), so in that sense it’s already covered. But I wanted to somehow
specify this very particular piece of behavior so that in the future
if someone breaks it, there’s a spec that points right to the problem.
I think that if someone breaks my layout this way (e.g. accidentally
removing the yield in a future edit), most (all?) of my acceptance
tests will fail but it won’t be immediately obvious why.

Brandt