I find myself building a new application, Cartazzi, and since the "template app" I'm building from uses Rails Test not rspec, I'm back to the past using the native rails testing framework – something I probably last touched by in 2009.

This blog post summarizes different Rails testing examples and is a work in progress as I come up with new examples.

Thinks I Like About Rails Test

  • It is fast
  • Have I mentioned it is fast
  • It is so, so fast
  • It tells you when you write duplicate tests if the test "" block is the same

Things I Dislike About Rails Test

  • Lack of output formatting like rspec's nested documentation
  • The inability to nest tests; yes thoughtbot's matchers may provide this but they are 2+ years out of date and unclear if they are still maintained

Examples

Running a Single Test

rails test test/models/my_model.rb:22

Running All Tests

rails test test/models/my_model.rb

Examining the body of a page at runtime

debugger
response.body[0..250]


debugger
response.body.scan(/FOO/)

Asserting a form exists with different elements

Asserting a row exists within a table

assert_select 'table' do
  assert_select 'tr td', 'user1@example.com'
end

Asserting a select tag exists within a form

# this would find a select with an id of project_type
assert_select 'select#project_type'

Asserting a text area exists within a form

This assumes that the form do block illustrated above is used.

# this would find a textarea with an id of component_body-input
assert_select 'textarea#component_body-input'

Asserting text exists on an H1 element

assert_selector "h1", text: "Foobar"

Checking a list has 4 elements

assert_select "ol" do |elements|
  elements.each do |element|
    assert_select element, "li", 4
  end
end

Asserting a difference on a database creation operation

assert_difference('LinkType.count') do
  result = LinkType.find_or_create(OpenStruct.new(context: "execution_url", name: "development"))
  assert_equal result.class, LinkType
end

Asserting there should be no difference in database results

test "ProjectType.find_or_create should return a project_type when it already exists" do
  result_create = ProjectType.find_or_create(@name, @file_extension, @component_file)
  assert_no_difference("ProjectType.count") do
    result_find = ProjectType.find_or_create(@name, @file_extension, @component_file)
    assert_equal result_create.id, result_find.id
  end
end

When you get TypeError: no implicit conversion of Integer into String on an assert_difference or assert_no_difference test

It means you are missing the quotes below:

assert_no_difference("ProjectType.count")