Question

I am trying to refactor some RSpec/Rails tests so that they persist as few objects to the database as possible, but am having trouble trying to figure out how to re-write tests like the following:

describe User do
  context "record creation" do
    before(:each) { @user = User.new(user_atts) }

    it "should generate a confirmation_token" do
      # Generated as the result of a callback
      @user.save!
      expect(@user.confirmation_token).to be_present
    end

    it "should set the confirmed_at attribute to nil" do
      # Cleared as the result of a callback
      @user.save!
      expect(@user.confirmed_at).to be_nil
    end

    it "should call the send_confirmation_instructions method" do
      @user.should_receive(:send_confirmation_instructions) {}
      @user.save!
    end
  end

  def user_atts
    # return attributes hash
  end
end

This is a pretty simple example, but there are plenty of similar instances in my specs, and, for the most part, they all persist records to the database. I would love to take advantage of RSpec’s let and subject helpers, but am not fully sure that those would even help here.

I have been using FactoryGirl a lot and thought that maybe its build_stubbed strategy would speed up my specs a bit, but I couldn’t find many instances where it would help limit actual record creation (or maybe I don’t know how to use).

I assume there are some cases where a test requires record creation, but the above example hardly seems like one of them. Should I even be trying to refactor this or is there a better to write these tests? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

My tests would probably look something like this.

describe User do
  let(:user) { FactoryGirl.build_stubbed(:user) } 

  context "record creation" do
    it "should generate a confirmation_token" do
      user.save!
      expect(user.confirmation_token).to be_present
    end

    it "should set the confirmed_at attribute to nil" do
      user.save!
      expect(user.confirmed_at).to be_nil
    end

    it "should call the send_confirmation_instructions method" do
      expect(user).to receive(:send_confirmation_instructions).once
      user.save!
    end
  end
end

That’s using Factory Girl to create the user models. Also, I’d have DatabaseCleaner to clear the database after each test as stated by @RahulGarg

All you’d have to do is configure in your spec_helper something like this

  config.before(:suite) do
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction
    DatabaseCleaner.clean_with(:truncation)
  end

  config.before(:each) do
    DatabaseCleaner.start
  end

  config.after(:each) do
    DatabaseCleaner.clean
  end

This means after each test the Database would be cleared.