Question

How would I best go about testing the completeness of a page’s structural completeness?

As an example, I would like to make sure that the site menu has all required elements. It is built with a regular CSS-formatted and has elements as these:

<li><%= link_to "Some page", some_path %></li>
...
<li><%= link_to "Login", path_to_login_action %></li>
<li><%= link_to "Register", path_to_registration_action %></li>

Or is this in some way pointless anyway? (still trying to develop a sound understanding for testing style)

Answer 1

You could use the assert_select method:

describe "home page" do
  it "diplays all menu elements" do
    get "/home"
    assert_select "ul.menu li" do
      assert_select "a.first", "Some page"
      assert_select "a.another-class", "Login"
      assert_select "a.last", "Register"
    end
  end
end

in another case, include webrat or capybara in your Gemfile:

 gem 'capybara'
 gem 'webrat'

and use the have_selector method:

describe "home page" do
  it "diplays all menu elements" do
    visit "/home"
    within "ul.menu li" do 
      page.should have_selector("a.first", :text => "Some page")
      page.should have_selector("a.another-class", :text => "Login")
      page.should have_selector("a.last", :text => "Register")
    end
  end
end

Read more about Rspec-rails: http://github.com/rspec/rspec-rails#readme (see “Request Specs” chapter)