Question

I am in section 5.3 in Michael Hartl’s RoR tutorial, where I am adding a Contact Page. I ran $ bundle exec rspec spec/requests/static_pages_spec.rb. I cannot figure out the error. I made changes in spec/requests/static_pages_spec.rb, as well as added the appropriate route, action for the contact page and edited the view for the contact page. This is the output:

Failures:

  1) Static Pages Contact page should have the h1 'Contact'
 Failure/Error: visit '/static_pages/contact'
 ActionView::Template::Error:
   /Users/themaktravels/rails_projects/happy_app/app/views/static_pages/contact.html.erb:1: syntax error, unexpected ',', expecting ')'
   ...putBuffer.new; provide (:title, 'Contact') 
   ...                               ^
   /Users/themaktravels/rails_projects/happy_app/app/views/static_pages/contact.html.erb:1: syntax error, unexpected ')', expecting keyword_end
   ...ew; provide (:title, 'Contact') 
   ...                               ^
 # <internal:prelude>:10:in `synchronize'
 # ./spec/requests/static_pages_spec.rb:56:in `block (3 levels) in <top (required)>'

  2) Static Pages Contact page should have the title 'Contact'
 Failure/Error: visit '/static_pages/contact'
 ActionView::Template::Error:
   /Users/themaktravels/rails_projects/happy_app/app/views/static_pages/contact.html.erb:1: syntax error, unexpected ',', expecting ')'
   ...putBuffer.new; provide (:title, 'Contact') 
   ...                               ^
   /Users/themaktravels/rails_projects/happy_app/app/views/static_pages/contact.html.erb:1: syntax error, unexpected ')', expecting keyword_end
   ...ew; provide (:title, 'Contact') 
   ...                               ^
 # <internal:prelude>:10:in `synchronize'
 # ./spec/requests/static_pages_spec.rb:61:in `block (3 levels) in <top (required)>'

Finished in 0.53514 seconds
9 examples, 2 failures

Failed examples:

rspec ./spec/requests/static_pages_spec.rb:55 # Static Pages Contact page should have the h1 'Contact'
rspec ./spec/requests/static_pages_spec.rb:60 # Static Pages Contact page should have the title 'Contact'

In static_pages_spec.rb, I have following:

 describe "Contact page" do

     it "should have the h1 'Contact'" do
     visit '/static_pages/contact'
     page.should have_selector('h1', :text => 'Contact')
end

     it "should have the title 'Contact'" do
     visit '/static_pages/contact'
     page.should have_selector('title',
       :text => "Ruby on Rails Tutorial Happy App | Contact")
end

In the RoR tutorial, this is what you are instructed to have in static_pages_spec.rb:

 describe "Contact page" do

     it "should have the h1 'Contact'" do
     visit '/static_pages/contact'
     page.should have_selector('h1', text: 'Contact')
  end

     it "should have the title 'Contact'" do
     visit '/static_pages/contact'
     page.should have_selector('title',
                text: "Ruby on Rails Tutorial Sample App | Contact")
  end

The only changes I made in static_pages_spec.rb were (1) make “Sample App” to “Happy App” and (2) “text:” was used instead of “:text =>”, so that the format was consistent throughout the code in static_pages_spec.rb. When troubleshooting, I switched between both “text” versions and got the same result.

Any suggestions on what I should be looking for to solve the error? Also, I am unsure of how to read the error message, i.e. does the first section of the error show the proper method or vice versa?

Thank you!

Answer 1

It seems you have an unnecessary space on your provide line. It should be

<% provide(:title, 'Contact') %>

not

<% provide (:title, 'Contact') %>