rspec users - Nov 2011 - is there a convention for testing that a record exists?

In the app I am working on, there are a lot of observers for various models
which call Event.create! to log stuff...  So within a particular example,
various records might be created in order to test behavior-- and this would
result in several events being created.

So say, I have a spec that does:

it "creates an event when sharing a post" do
  user = create_user                # this will make an event record of type
"user created"
  post = create_post(:user => user) # this will make an event record of type
"post created"
  post.share!

  # check to see that Event has a "post shared" event
end

...

Normally I would just do Event.last.event_type.should == "post shared"

However, if the Event model has it''s default_scope set to order records
in a
certain way, that test might fail.

So I could do:

Event.unscoped.last.event_type.should == "post shared"

But then I begin thinking maybe it should be more like this:

it "creates an event when sharing a post" do
  Event.exists?(:event_type => "post shared").should be_false

  user = create_user # this will make an event record of type "user
created"
  post = create_post(:user => user) # this will make an event record of type
"post created"
  post.share!

  Event.exists?(:event_type => "post shared").should be_true
end

...  I''m just not sure what''s the best way to go, and if
there''s a convention
for this sort of thing?

Patrick J. Collins
http://collinatorstudios.com

On Nov 29, 2011, at 2:32 PM, Patrick J. Collins wrote:
> In the app I am working on, there are a lot of observers for various models
> which call Event.create! to log stuff...  So within a particular example,
> various records might be created in order to test behavior-- and this would
> result in several events being created.
> 
> So say, I have a spec that does:
> 
> it "creates an event when sharing a post" do
>  user = create_user                # this will make an event record of type
"user created"
>  post = create_post(:user => user) # this will make an event record of
type "post created"
>  post.share!
> 
>  # check to see that Event has a "post shared" event
> end
> 
> ...
> 
> Normally I would just do Event.last.event_type.should == "post
shared"
> 
> However, if the Event model has it''s default_scope set to order
records in a
> certain way, that test might fail.
> 
> So I could do:
> 
> Event.unscoped.last.event_type.should == "post shared"
> 
> But then I begin thinking maybe it should be more like this:
> 
> it "creates an event when sharing a post" do
>  Event.exists?(:event_type => "post shared").should be_false
> 
>  user = create_user # this will make an event record of type "user
created"
>  post = create_post(:user => user) # this will make an event record of
type "post created"
>  post.share!
> 
>  Event.exists?(:event_type => "post shared").should be_true
> end
> 
> ...  I''m just not sure what''s the best way to go, and if
there''s a convention
> for this sort of thing?

I''m not aware of a solid convention for this. I tend to avoid the
pairing of the 1st and last lines of the 2nd example.

Are the events associated to the posts at all? If so you could specify
post.events.map(&:event_type).should include("post shared") or
some such.