Question

I suspect I just being very dumb with this and missing something obvious. But I fairly new to rspec and factory girl and cannot get this simple test to work.

Basically I have set up a model called page and am calling it in the controller like this:

@pages = Page.where(:page_type => "homepage").limit(2)

for in my test I do the following:

before do
     @pages = [Factory(:page), Factory(:page, :title=> "Contact", :content=>"contact content", :meta=>"meta content", :page_type=>'homepage') ]
     get 'index'
end

it 'should set the pages variable' do
   assigns[:pages].should_not be_nil
   assigns[:pages].length == 2;
end

yet all I get is:

Failure/Error: assigns[:pages].should_not be_nil
expected not nil, got nil

ANy help greatly appreciated

Answer 1

Your controller is setting its @pages instance variable to nil. Most likely it’s not being assigned to at all. Are you sure the code snippet which you pasted:

@pages = Page.where(:page_type => "homepage").limit(2)

is being called in the index action of your controller? If so, that code would set @pages to the empty list, not nil.