[rspec-users] rspec macro style

[Lenny Marks]

One of the things that always annoys me when I write/use typical macros in my specs is how the backtrace from failures don't include the caller of the macro. Not a huge deal because the example name can be used to track it down, but I lose the ability to do things like click on the line from the backtrace in my IDE(I use RubyMine). I find that feature to be a nice time saver. I've never heard any mention of this bothering anybody so maybe I'm just being pedantic but tweaking things so that the actual example implementation is yielded by the caller seems like a better style to me because it solves that problem. Just curious if anybody else has any thoughts one way or the other. I've been leaning toward the latter when possible.

Full example at:
https://gist.github.com/1169172

ex. When the example below fails, line 17 is significant

     5  describe Email do
     6    describe '.normalize', ' should strip email down to core address' do 
     7      def self.normalized(original, options)
     8        it %{normalizes '#{original}' as '#{options[:should_be]}'} do
     9          Email.normalize(original).should == options[:should_be]
    10        end
    11      end
    .....
    16      describe 'it strips whitespace' do
    17        normalized('   joe at somewhere.com', :should_be => 'joe at somewhere.com')
    18      end

Failures:

  1) Email.normalize should strip email down to core address it strips whitespace normalizes '   joe at somewhere.com' as 'joe at somewhere.com'
     Failure/Error: Email.normalize(original).should == options[:should_be]
       expected: "joe at somewhere.com"
            got: "   joe at somewhere.com" (using ==)
     # org/jruby/RubyProc.java:268:in `call'
     # ./spec/lib/email_spec.rb:9:in `normalized'
     # org/jruby/RubyKernel.java:2028:in `instance_eval'

Compare to this where the significant lines are present in the backtrace

describe Email do
     6    describe '.normalize', ' should strip email down to core address' do 
     7      def self.normalized(original, &blk)
     8        describe "'#{original}'" do
     9          subject { Email.normalize(original) }
    10          it { instance_eval(&blk) }
    11        end
    12      end
    ......
    17      describe 'it strips whitespace' do
    18        normalized('   joe at somewhere.com') { should == 'joe at somewhere.com' }
    19      end

Failures:

  1) Email.normalize should strip email down to core address it strips whitespace '   joe at somewhere.com' 
     Failure/Error: normalized('   joe at somewhere.com') { should == 'joe at somewhere.com' }
       expected: "joe at somewhere.com"
            got: "   joe at somewhere.com" (using ==)
     # org/jruby/RubyProc.java:268:in `call'
     # ./spec/lib/email_spec.rb:18:in `(root)'
     # org/jruby/RubyKernel.java:2028:in `instance_eval'
     # ./spec/lib/email_spec.rb:10:in `normalized'
     # org/jruby/RubyKernel.java:2028:in `instance_eval'
     ...


-lenny