Question

I’m beginning with Rails and currently I got stuck on integration testing of controllers.

I’m trying to validate that if certain values are provided by a user in a form, Active Record generates errors and these errors are passed to a view.

My problem is that I have no idea how to access controller assigned variables (for example – @user) inside integration tests. As I read in http://guides.rubyonrails.org/testing.html#what-to-include-in-your-functional-tests I can access variables such as @controller, @request, @response but I was also expecting that I can easily access variables assigned by controller.

Unfortunately things such as:
* @user
* @controller.user

don’t really work :-/

Answer 1

Rails Version < 5.0

You can access these variables using assigns method with symbol of variable name as a perameter. In example:

assigns(:user) 

Gives you value of @user from your controller.

Rails Version > 5.0

In rails 5.0 assigns and assert_template has been_depracted, so in order to use it as before you need to add:

gem 'rails-controller-testing' 

to your Gemfile.

Original discussion why using assigns is a bad idea.