One of RSpec’s developers, David Chelimsky, released a little helper to
remedy a clunky pattern¹ in the controller
specs². David gave the following example as what is considered “clunky”, I’m sure you all do it, I know I do.

  describe PersonController, "handling failed POST to create" do
    def do_post
      post :create, invalid_arguments
    end
 
    it "should redisplay the create form" do
      do_post
      response.should render_template("people/new")
    end
 
    it "should try to create a Person" do
      Person.should_receive(:create).with(invalid_arguments).and_return(false)
      do_post
    end
  end

So, as a solution to the clunkiness in the example above, David proposed this:

  describe PersonController, "handling failed POST to create" do
    def do_post
      post :create, invalid_arguments
    end
 
    it "should redisplay the create form" do
      after_post do
        response.should render_template("people/new")
      end
    end
 
    it "should try to create a Person" do
      during_post do
        Person.should_receive(:create).with(invalid_arguments).and_return(false)
      end
    end
  end

I honestly have to say, that I like this style a lot. This style adds a lot more verbosity, and clarity to the point of controller speccing. I know that if I
were a beginner all over again, this would have removed a lot of confusion that I went through during those days.

The Helper

If you’d like to use this, you can simply copy and paste the following code and put it into spec_helper.rb:

  [:get, :post, :put, :delete, :render].each do |action|
    eval %Q{
      def before_#{action}
        yield
        do_#{action}
      end
      alias during_#{action} before_#{action}
      def after_#{action}
        do_#{action}
        yield
      end
    }
  end

Thanks to David Chelimsky for writing this out. I think this has potential to go into RSpec’s ruby_on_rails core, so far it’s just a helper.

How do you feel about this new pattern? Could you see this going into the RSpec ruby_on_rails core?

1. There was a suggestion in the rspec tracker, or the mailing list about a feature to dry up the controller specs. [↩]
2. Specs are basically tests, but under a different mentality. RSpec adopts the philosophy of Behavior Driven Development, which imposes this new mentality
   of covering your code. [↩]

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