[rspec-users] Should change not comparing arrays how I expected

[Ashley Moran]

On Sep 28, 2008, at 5:01 pm, David Chelimsky wrote:

> Wow.
>
> OK - here's what I figured out. Talk about insidious bugs! This is
> actually quite a bit different from what I thought.
>
> There are two lambdas involved here:
>
> lambda {
>  1st lambda: expression that should cause the change
> }.should change{
>  2nd lambda: expression that returns the object that should change
> }.to(expected value)
>
> The matcher executes the 1st lambda and stores the result as @before.
> In your example this is a Rails association proxy for the
> Story.unposted collection.
>
> The matcher then executes the 2nd lambda.
>
> The matcher then executes the 1st lambda again and stores the result
> as @after. In your example, this is, again, a Rails association proxy
> for the Story.unposted collection.

Hey,

Thanks for looking at this so quick!  I'm sure I should be paying for  
RSpec :)

I think I follow, except shouldn't your references to lambdas 1 and 2  
be reversed above?


> At this point, @before and @after point to the same object - the same
> Rails association proxy!!!!!!
>
> The matcher passes if @before != @after and fails if @before ==
> @after. Because they are actually the same association proxy, the
> example fails.
>
> Now rspec asks the matcher to print out the reason why it failed,
> which does this:
>
> "#{result} should have been changed to #{@to.inspect}, but is now
> #{@after.inspect}"
>
> @to is the expected value []
> @after is the association proxy, which proxies to an empty collection.
> Now, when the matcher calls @after.inspect, is the first time that the
> proxy is actually evaluated!!!!
>
> Does this make sense?

Yes I sees what's going on now.

But... I'm not using Rails, and in fact I'm not even writing a web  
app.  I'm using DataMapper, but clearly it violates the PoLS like AR.   
What I'd give for an ORM that uses plain old Ruby objects!!!

Ashley


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