Question

I’m an RSpec newb, but am really loving how easy it is to write the tests and I’m continually refactoring them to be cleaner as I learn new features of RSpec. So, originally, I had the following:

describe Account do
  context "when new" do
    let(:account) { Account.new }
    subject { account }

    it "should have account attributes" do
      subject.account_attributes.should_not be_nil
    end
  end
end

I then learned about the its method, so I tried to rewrite it as such:

describe Account do
  context "when new" do
    let(:account) { Account.new }
    subject { account }

    its(:account_attributes, "should not be nil") do
      should_not be_nil
    end
  end
end

This fails due to its not accepting 2 arguments, but removing the message works just fine. The issue is that if the test fails, the message under the Failed examples section just says

rspec ./spec/models/account_spec.rb:23 # Account when new account_attributes

which isn’t overly helpful.

So, is there a way to pass a message to its, or better yet, have it output a sane message automatically?

Answer 1

You could define an RSpec custom matcher:

RSpec::Matchers.define :have_account_attributes do
  match do |actual|
    actual.account_attributes.should_not be_nil
  end
  failure_message_for_should do
    "expected account_attributes to be present, got nil"
  end
end

describe Account do
  it { should have_account_attributes }
end