rspec-1.3.2 | rspec-rails-1.3.4

Views

View Examples live in $RAILS_ROOT/spec/views/.

Spec::Rails supports the specification of views in complete isolation from their controllers.
This allows you to spec and write your views even before their controllers exist,
or before the related actions have been developed. It also means that bugs introduced
into controllers will not cause view specs to fail.

As noted in the introduction, these are great benefits
but they could hide bugs that exist in the interaction between a controller and its
view. We strongly recommend combining these isolated view specs with some sort of
high level integration testing, ideally using Cucumber

Here are some of the methods available to you, but see Spec::Rails::Expectations for more detail.

Conveniences

assigns

Use assigns[:key] to set instance variables to be used in the view. We highly recommend that
you exploit the mock framework here rather than providing real model objects in order to
keep the view specs isolated from changes to your models.

# example
article = mock_model(Article)
article.should_receive(:author).and_return("Joe")
article.should_receive(:text).and_return("this is the text of the article")
assigns[:article] = article
assigns[:articles] = [article]

# template
<% for article in @articles -%>
<!-- etc -->

flash, params and session

Use flash[:key], params[:key] and session[:key] to set values in the example that can
be accessed by the view.

# example
flash[:notice] = "Message in flash"
params[:account_id] = "1234"
session[:user_id] = "5678"

# template
<%= flash[:notice] %>
<%= params[:account_id] %>
<%= session[:user_id] %>

Expectations

Spec::Rails’ View Examples support the following custom expectations.

response.should have_tag

This wraps assert_select and is available in both View Examples and Controller Examples run in integration mode.

response.should have_tag('div') #passes if any div tags appear
response.should have_tag('div#interesting_div')
response.should have_tag('div', 'expected content')
response.should have_tag('div', /regexp matching expected content/)
response.should have_tag('form[action=?]', things_path)
response.should have_tag("input[type=?][checked=?]", 'checkbox', 'checked')
response.should have_tag('ul') do
  with_tag('li', 'list item 1')
  with_tag('li', 'list item 2')
  with_tag('li', 'list item 3')
end

Note that any of the hash values can be either Strings or Regexps and will be
evaluated accordingly.

response[:capture].should have_tag

This way you can access content that has been captured with content_for.

template.should_receive(:current_user).and_return(mock("user"))