[rspec-users] State Based vs. Behaviour Based Spec/Testing

[aslak hellesoy]

On 3/25/07, Pat Maddox <pergesu at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/25/07, Scott Taylor <mailing_lists at railsnewbie.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Mar 25, 2007, at 2:40 AM, Pat Maddox wrote:
> >
> > > On 3/25/07, Scott Taylor <mailing_lists at railsnewbie.com> wrote:
> > >>
> > >> On Mar 25, 2007, at 2:25 AM, Pat Maddox wrote:
> > >>
> > >>> On 3/24/07, Scott Taylor <mailing_lists at railsnewbie.com> wrote:
> > >>>> 1.  Should you test protected and private methods in your specs?
> > >>>
> > >>> No.  You're specifying the behavior of an object as seen by the
> > >>> outside world.  Of course protected and private methods aren't
> > >>> available to the world, so why would you need to test them?  When
> > >>> you're doing state-based testing, just call a method and then verify
> > >>> that it returns the expected value or leaves your object in an
> > >>> expected state.
> > >>>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> How about if your writing code that is *only* meant to be reused?
> > >> E.g., you are writing some class which is only meant to be derived
> > >> from (ruby metaprogramming - Spec'ing rails would be a good example)?
> > >>
> > >
> > > I'm not sure what you mean, to tell you the truth.  Would you mind
> > > showing an example of some code that you want to spec but aren't sure
> > > how?
> >
> > I had in mind a rails generic crud controller.  The basic gist of it
> > is would be one class which had a series of private class methods.
> > These methods could be called in any class which derived from this
> > class, which would then set certain instance variables and instance
> > methods for use in the class.
> >
> > A good example is a typical rails controller, or class:
> >
> > class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
> >    has_many :posts
> > end
> >
> > If you say something like:
> >
> > @person = Person.find(:first_name => "Scott", :last_name => "Taylor)
> >
> > @person.posts
> >
> > The first line will find the first person in the database that
> > matches "Scott Taylor."  The second will find all posts associated
> > with Scott Taylor.
> >
> > What do you think the ActiveRecord::Base class is going to look
> > like?  It's going to have a private class method named "has_many"
> > which excepts a string or symbol as a parameter.  This will then
> > create an instance method in the derived class.  In this example,
> > that instance method would "posts".  (For simplicity sake I've left
> > out or changed some details of all the other things rails does).
> >
> > ActiveRecord::Base will never be used on its own, only as a class
> > which is derived from.
> >
> > So how would ActiveRecord::Base be spec'ed out for this example?
>
> I'm not sure how the Rails codebase is tested, but I think I'd do
>
> base = ActiveRecord::Base.new
> base.send :has_many, :posts
>
> and verify from there.  I'm interested to see what David and Aslak think.
>

The (controller) specs generated by the rspec_resource generator are
good examples on how to test a controller. I would just use them
as-is.

Aslak

> Pat
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