Question

I made it up to Chapter 9 of the Ruby on Rails tutorial, and added functionality of my own to lock a user when they first sign up, such that an admin has to go in and approve (“unlock”) their id before a new user has access to the site. I added a :locked boolean attribute that works just like the :admin attribute of the User object. I have that all working now, but I’m having trouble writing a simple test for it. I added the following test to user_pages_spec.rb, just under the hierarchy “pagination” – “as an admin user”:

describe "as an admin user to unlock new users" do
    let(:admin) { FactoryGirl.create(:admin) }
    let(:locked_user) { FactoryGirl.create(:locked) }
    before do
      sign_in admin
      visit users_path
    end

    it { should have_link('unlock', href: user_path(locked_user)) }
    it { should_not have_link('unlock', href: user_path(admin)) }
end

and to support the creation of a “locked” user, added this to factories.rb:

factory :locked do
    locked true
end

I can confirm manually through Firefox that the unlocking link shows up, but I’m still getting the following failure:

  1) User pages index pagination as an admin user to unlock new users 
     Failure/Error: it { should have_link('unlock', href: user_path(locked_user)) }
       expected link "unlock" to return something
     # ./spec/requests/user_pages_spec.rb:64:in `block (5 levels) in <top (required)>'

I’m interested in knowing a) why this fails :), but also b) how to go about debugging a problem like this. How do I tell what the test is actually “seeing”? I tried rails-pry with a different problem as suggested by another stackoverflow user, but in this case I’ve found it of limited use.

Any ideas or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

-Matt

Answer 1

You are supposed to write the test first 😉

Using your test as a start, I have been working through the process. I have gotten to the point of getting the same error as you. Using the pry-rails gem and putting binding.pry in the test:

it { binding.pry ; should have_link('unlock', href: user_path(locked_user)) }

(After messing around a lot) I copy and paste from the test to the command prompt:

should have_link('unlock', href: user_path(locked_user))

and get the error. Changing it to:

should have_link('unlock', href: user_path(User.first))

works. Entering locked_user at the prompt shows me the user record. Next I entered page.body and it shows me my locked user doesn’t even show up on the page. (Confirmed by entering User.count and found it to be 33 so it was on page 2.) You may not have this problem depending on how deeply embedded your test is the specs. I realized I had embedded it inside another spec accidentally. When I moved it out (User.count == 2), it still didn’t work. My locked_user still wasn’t on the page. User.all didn’t include the user either. Hartl mentions in chapter 10,

This uses the let! (read “let bang”) method in place of let; the reason is that let variables are lazy, meaning that they only spring into existence when referenced.

Changed the let to let! and it worked. (User.count == 3, including the locked_user this time.) Here is the test block.

describe "as an admin user" do
  let(:admin) { FactoryGirl.create(:admin) }
  before do
    sign_in admin
    visit users_path
  end

...

  describe "other users should have an unlock link" do  ## changed the description
    let!(:locked_user) { FactoryGirl.create(:locked) }
    before { visit users_path }

    it { should have_link('unlock', href: user_path(locked_user)) }
  end
end

My code doesn’t unlock anything yet (I’ll need another test for that…) but the link shows up when it should. 🙂