Question

i’m daily in the process of learning new things about Rails (started learning 2 and now migrating to 3 concepts). As a project with Rails, i’m coding a browser game. Till now, i’ve been using fixtures to load data to my database and i’ve creating a custom task to recreate the db, load fixtures etc every time i need to. I have to say that i like this approach because i can easily define my monsters with weapons, bonuses etc through active record associations in features.

However, i see that people use a testing environment like RSpec for that kind of things. Although i see that RSpec is used as a language to define proper behaviour, i don’t clearly see how it could help me. But since i like to do things the correct way, i’m pretty sure that there is much more for me to understand and read about it.

Therefore, i would like to ask for a solid example of how RSpec could be helpful. For instance, let’s say that a user creates an alliance. Through my code, i’m checking whether this user already has an alliance, whether an alliance with that name exists, whether he has the money to create this alliance and more. Where would RSpec fit here ? What would a nice usage example be ?

Moreover, is fixtures done using RSpec in another way ?

I already know that Rails has many great programmer conveniences and i would like to harvest this one as well. But i’m still ignorant about RSpec. That is why i would appreciate some useful insight. Thank you 🙂

Answer 1

Rspec is a testing framework. It allows you to write automated pieces of code that verify that your code is actually working. For example, you could write a test to make sure that no two alliances have the same name:

describe Alliance do
  it 'should not have the same name as another alliance' do
    first = Alliance.create :name => "Test Name"
    second = Alliance.build :name => "Test Name"

    second.should_not be_valid
  end
end

This code would then verify that no two alliances can have the same name – it’s a way of testing that your code is actually working.

Fixtures, Factories, Mocks and Stubs are all ways of creating temporary data that can be used in tests. RSpec can use Fixtures, but it doesn’t require them either. If you want to load test data into your database you can do this in whichever method best suits your needs to perform tests.

Some other testing frameworks are Cucumber, TestUnit, MiniTest and Shoulda. You should be using one already to write tests for your code. You can also read up on the others to find out which framework best suits your needs.