Question

I have the following to remove the spaces on a specific attribute.

#before_validation :strip_whitespace

protected
  def strip_whitespace
    self.title = self.title.strip
  end

And I want to test it. For now, I’ve tried:

it "shouldn't create a new part with title beggining with space" do
   @part = Part.new(@attr.merge(:title => " Test"))
   @part.title.should.eql?("Test")
end

What am I missing?

Answer 1

Validations won’t run until the object is saved, or you invoke valid? manually. Your before_validation callback isn’t being run in your current example because your validations are never checked. In your test I would suggest that you run @part.valid? before checking that the title is changed to what you expect it to be.

app/models/part.rb

class Part < ActiveRecord::Base
  before_validation :strip_whitespace

protected
  def strip_whitespace
    self.title = self.title.strip
  end
end

spec/models/part_spec.rb

require 'spec_helper'

describe Part do
  it "should remove extra space when validated" do
    part = Part.new(:title => " Test")
    part.valid?
    part.title.should == "Test"
  end
end

This will pass when the validation is included, and fails when the validation is commented out.