Question

I keep getting the same two failures for a test trying to create a signin page.

Here is the error message: $ bundle exec rspec spec/requests/user_pages_spec.rb
FF

Failures:

1) User pages signup page
Failure/Error: before { visit signup_path }
ActionView::Template::Error:
undefined method |' for "Ruby on Rails Tutorial Sample App":String
# ./app/helpers/application_helper.rb:9:infull_title’
# ./app/views/layouts/application.html.erb:4:in _app_views_layouts_application_html_erb__2148911516627374684_2168968760'
# ./spec/requests/user_pages_spec.rb:8:inblock (3 levels) in ‘

2) User pages signup page
Failure/Error: before { visit signup_path }
ActionView::Template::Error:
undefined method |' for "Ruby on Rails Tutorial Sample App":String
# ./app/helpers/application_helper.rb:9:infull_title’
# ./app/views/layouts/application.html.erb:4:in _app_views_layouts_application_html_erb__2148911516627374684_2168968760'
# ./spec/requests/user_pages_spec.rb:8:inblock (3 levels) in ‘

Finished in 0.17668 seconds
2 examples, 2 failures

Failed examples:

rspec ./spec/requests/user_pages_spec.rb:10 # User pages signup page
rspec ./spec/requests/user_pages_spec.rb:11 # User pages signup page

And here is the file user_pages_spec.rb

require ‘spec_helper’

describe “User pages” do

subject { page }

describe “signup page” do
before { visit signup_path }

it { should have_selector('h1', text: 'Sign up') }
it { should have_selector('title', text: full_title('Sign up')) }

end
end

here is the file application_helper.rb:

module ApplicationHelper

  # Returns the full title on a per-page basis.
  def full_title(page_title)
    base_title = "Ruby on Rails Tutorial Sample App"
    if page_title.empty?
      base_title
    else
      "#{base_title}" | "#{page_title}"
    end
  end
end

here is the file routes.rb
SampleApp::Application.routes.draw do
get “users/new”

  root to: 'static_pages#home'

  match '/signup',  to: 'users#new'

  match '/help',    to: 'static_pages#help'
  match '/about',   to: 'static_pages#about'
  match '/contact', to: 'static_pages#contact'

I’ve been stuck on this for quite a bit so any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Answer 1

The rails error messages it gives you here are pretty descriptive.

If we look at the line

undefined method `|' for "Ruby on Rails Tutorial Sample App":String # ./app/helpers/application_helper.rb:9:in full_title

It’s telling us it can’t find a method called | for the String "Ruby on Rails Tutorial Sample App" on line 9 of application_helper.rb in the full_title method definition. If we got to that line we can see

 "#{base_title}" | "#{page_title}"

Which ruby interprets as “run the method | on the result of “#{base_title}” (which in this case evaluates to the String “Ruby on Rails Tutorial Sample App”) with the argument “#{page_title}”. Since Strings don’t have a ‘|’ method, it returns an “undefined method” error.

To fix, just change the line to

 "#{base_title} | #{page_title}"