Question

I am trying to test my Rails 3.0.9 controller with Rspec 2.6.4 and Webrat 0.7.3. My controller looks like this:

#metrics_controller.rb
class MetricsController < ApplicationController
  def show
    @metric = Metric.all(:msrun_id => params[:id]).first
  end

  def index
    @metrics = Metric.all
  end
end

And my controller spec looks like this:

#metrics_controller_spec.rb
require 'spec_helper'

describe MetricsController do
  describe "GET #index" do
    it "should be successful" do
      get :index
      response.should be_success
    end
  end

  describe "GET show" do
    it 'contains an overview of a metric' do
      get :show, :id => 1
      response.should have_selector('title', :content => "Metric Overview")
    end
  end
end

This looks very similar to other examples I have seen in documentation, but when I run bundle exec rspec spec/controllers/metrics_controller_spec.rb I am getting some strange errors:

1) MetricsController GET #index should be successful
Failure/Error: response.should be_success
     TypeError:
       wrong argument type RSpec::Matchers::BePredicate (expected Proc)
     # ./spec/controllers/metrics_controller_spec.rb:8

  2) MetricsController GET show contains an overview of a metric
     Failure/Error: response.should have_selector('title')
     TypeError:
       wrong argument type Webrat::Matchers::HaveSelector (expected Proc)
     # ./spec/controllers/metrics_controller_spec.rb:16

It looks like something weird is going on with the response.should method. If I change the first example to something more verbose that doesn’t call should on response like this:

response.success?.should == true

then the example works fine, but why would should be expecting a Proc? Any ideas about how I can fix this?

Answer 1

This is not an especially helpful answer, but I will put it in here in case someone else gets stuck on the same thing. I inherited the project from someone else, and they set it up to use both railties and rails. Changing the Gemfile to look like this:

source 'http://rubygems.org'

RAILS_VERSION = '~> 3.0.7'
DM_VERSION    = '~> 1.1.0'
gem 'railties', RAILS_VERSION, :require => 'rails'
gem 'activesupport', RAILS_VERSION
gem 'actionpack', RAILS_VERSION
gem 'actionmailer', RAILS_VERSION
gem 'dm-rails',          DM_VERSION
gem 'rspec-rails'
#other gems below

Instead of something like this:

source 'http://rubygems.org'
gem 'rails'    
gem 'dm-rails',          '~> 1.1.0'
gem 'rspec-rails'
#other gems below

along with changing the config/application.rb to require the railties instead of rails seemed to fix it. The key seemed to be using railties instead of all of rails along with dm-rails.