Being fully aware of the work of Mr. Preston-Werner[1] and err.the.blog[2], we present to you Scenarios, a somewhat different approach[3] to alleviating the pain of managing table data for a Rails application under test.
A simple scenario looks like this:
# in spec/scenarios/users_scenario.rb class UsersScenario < Scenario::Base def load create_record :user, :john, :name => 'John', :password => 'doodaht' create_record :user, :cindy, :name => 'Cindy', :password => 'whoot!' end end
To use the UsersScenario in an RSpec description, you should declare it using the scenario method:
# in spec/models/user_spec.rb describe User do scenario :users
it "should allow me to do something with John" do user = users(:john) user.password.should == "doodaht" end end
In real life your scenarios will probably grow quite complicated. The scenarios plugin allows you to deal with this complexity through composition.
Here's a simple example:
# in spec/scenarios/posts_scenario.rb class PostsScenario < Scenario::Base def load create_record :post, :first, :title => "First Post" create_record :post, :second, :title => "Second Post" end end
# in spec/scnearios/comments_scenario.rb class CommentsScenario < Scenario::Base uses :posts
def load create_record :comment, :first, :body => "Nice post!", :post_id => post_id(:first) create_record :comment, :second, :body => "I like it.", :post_id => post_id(:first) create_record :comment, :third, :body => "I thoroughly disagree.", :post_id => post_id(:second) end end
When you use a scenario, you get any help the scenario provides made available to your RSpec examples.
# in spec/scenarios/users_scenario.rb class UsersScenario < Scenario::Base def load create_user :name => "John" end
helpers do def create_user(attributes={}) create_record :user, attributes[:name].downcase.intern, attributes end def login_as(user) @request.session[:user_id] = user.id end end end
# in spec/controllers/projects_controller_spec.rb describe "Projects screen" do scenario :users
it "should show active projects" do login_as(users(:john)) get :projects @response.should have_tag('#active_projects') end end
You can load your scenarios into your development database, too!
rake db:scenario:load SCENARIO=comments
Scenarios works by doing direct inserts instead of using ActiveRecord instances - there is no validation - similar to the way the current fixtures implementation works.
You may find greater detail at the RubyForge project site[4]. Any feedback from those seeing value and giving it a spin is greatly appreciated.
Adam Williams
1. Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting. 2. http://errtheblog.com/post/7708 3. http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/rspec-users/2007-October/003883.html 4. http://faithfulcode.rubyforge.org/svn/plugins/trunk/scenarios/README