Question

I need to test that a piece of code executes two sql statements, which I’m doing by saying

  ActiveRecord::Base.connection.should_receive(:execute).with("s1")
  ActiveRecord::Base.connection.should_receive(:execute).with("s2")

However, the code also executes a lot of other statements that I don’t care about, which trips up the test. How do I tell Rspec to make sure that s1 and s2 are in the list of executed statements?

Answer 1

Update your version of RSpec to 2.12 and you will have access to the and_call_original method (see the documentation and use cases). Using that method, you can stub the execute method of ActiveRecord::Base.connection and make it call through to the original method, and then just add to that the expectations you want:

ActiveRecord::Base.connection.stub(:execute).and_call_original
ActiveRecord::Base.connection.should_receive(:execute).with(:s1)
ActiveRecord::Base.connection.should_receive(:execute).with(:s2)

If for whatever reason you are not using (or don’t want to use) the latest version of RSpec, you can achieve the same functionality this way:

execute = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.method(:execute)
ActiveRecord::Base.connection.should_receive(:execute).with(:s1)
ActiveRecord::Base.connection.should_receive(:execute).with(:s2)
ActiveRecord::Base.connection.stub(:execute) { |*args| execute.call(*args) }

Refs:

• rspec 2: detect call to method but still have it perform its function
• Expect method call and proxy to original method with RSpec