rspec users - Jul 2009 - Making sure a action exists (aka specing a controller action)

Hello list!

In my efforts of following BDD in a disciplined manner, I found myself
needing to spec a Rails action.

The behavior I wanted to test was: "This controller should handle the
index action", and since it is not good practice to go to the
implementation before specing, I decided to spec the action too, so I
could start defining it. I did:

describe MyController do

 it "should handle get requests to the index action" do
   get :index
   response.should be_success
 end

The problem is the assertion. Even if you don''t have the action, the
http response will be 200 OK. I tried to check for the "Unknown
Action" text (with the have_text matcher) but strangely enough, even
if you don''t have the action defined in the controller, the response
body is always empty (which doesn''t happen if you request from
mongrel, which shows an "Unknown action" page.

Any ideas on how I could assert that the index action exists and that
it fails when it is not there? Maybe this test doesn''t make sense? Any
suggestions welcome!

Thanks,

Marcelo.

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 11:19 AM, Marcelo de Moraes
Serpa<celoserpa at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello list!
>
> In my efforts of following BDD in a disciplined manner, I found myself
> needing to spec a Rails action.
>
> The behavior I wanted to test was: "This controller should handle the
> index action", and since it is not good practice to go to the
> implementation before specing, I decided to spec the action too, so I
> could start defining it. I did:
>
> describe MyController do
>
> ?it "should handle get requests to the index action" do
> ? get :index
> ? response.should be_success
> ?end
>
> The problem is the assertion. Even if you don''t have the action,
the
> http response will be 200 OK. I tried to check for the "Unknown
> Action" text (with the have_text matcher) but strangely enough, even
> if you don''t have the action defined in the controller, the
response
> body is always empty (which doesn''t happen if you request from
> mongrel, which shows an "Unknown action" page.
>
> Any ideas on how I could assert that the index action exists and that
> it fails when it is not there? Maybe this test doesn''t make sense?
Any
> suggestions welcome!
So it looks like you''ve uncovered a rspec-rails bug. I''m not
sure when
it appeared because I''m pretty sure there was a time when this would
work as you expect, but right now there are no specs for missing
actions - only missing templates - so something in rspec-rails is
consuming the fact that the action is missing.

I added https://rspec.lighthouseapp.com/projects/5645-rspec/tickets/860
- please feel free to follow and/or add comments to that ticket.

Cheers,
David
>
> Thanks,
>
> Marcelo.
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