Testing: be_new_record

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello,

in the railscast episode 71, Ryan uses in a test be_new_record. Running tests with be_new_record causes a NameError: undefined local variable or method.

The episode isn't on git and I didn't find the code. I installed rspec and mocha, but didn't find on google the origin of this function. Is this just a self implemented helper function or is it a function out of a testing framework? Which one?

Matthias.

2

Rspec has a really cool feature where, if you assert that something should be_something_else it'll assume there's a method called something_else?

So for example;

Suppose you had a model called Sushi.

In your spec you could write:

describe Sushi do

  it "should be awesome"     @sushi.should be_awesome   end

end

This will assume there is a method called awesome? available to @sushi and will call it and expect it to return true.

ActiveRecord::Base, which all of your models will inherit from has a method called "new_record?". By using "@model.should be_new_record" or "@model.should be_a_new_record" you're essentially saying that the new_record? method should be called and should return true.

If you're getting a NoMethod error specifically on "be_a_new_record" then you might want to ensure you have the latest versions of rspec and rspec-rails.

Hope that helps?

Gavin

3

If you're getting a NoMethod error specifically on "be_a_new_record" then you might want to ensure you have the latest versions of rspec and rspec-rails.

Hmm. Actually I got this error, but I have installed rspec and rspec- rails and put it to the config/environments/test with the following lines:

config.gem "rspec", :lib => false, :version => ">= 1.2.0" config.gem "rspec-rails", :lib => false, :version => ">= 1.2.0" config.gem "mocha"

be_new_record is a function of rspec?

Matthias.