Question

I’m having trouble decoupling my tests from Rails. For instance, how to stub the current_user method (from Devise) that gets called in the helper below?

Helper module:

module UsersOmniauthCallbacksHelper

  def socialmedia_name(account)
    name = current_user.send(account)['info']['name']
    name = current_user.name if name.blank?
    name
  end

end

Test

require_relative '../../app/helpers/users_omniauth_callbacks_helper.rb'

describe 'UsersOmniauthCallbacksHelper' do
  include UsersOmniauthCallbacksHelper

  describe '#socialmedia_name(account)' do
    it 'should return the users name listed by the social media provider when that name is provided' do

      #once I've done away spec_helper, this next line ain't gonna fly.
      helper.stub(:current_user) { FactoryGirl.create(:user, facebook:  {"info"=>{"name"=>"Mark Zuckerberg"}}) }

      socialmedia_name('facebook').should == "Mark Zuckerberg"
    end
  end
end

How do I stub the current_user method that gets used in the class?

If I were loading Rails, the test could still keep my helper.stub(:current_user). But naturally, that won’t work now since I’m not loading the spec_helper file.

Answer 1

For testing modules, your best choice is to include your helper into a test class, create a new instance, and then stub the methods from there. In addtion, you should move more of the name logic into the model, so that you don’t need to have the helper know about send(account), and that the return of it is a hash, which has a hash (Law of Demeter). I would want pretty much all of the socialmedia_name method to be in the model. For example:

describe 'UsersOmniauthCallbacksHelper' do
  let(:helper) do
    Class.new do
      include UsersOmniauthCallbacksHelper
      attr_accessor :current_user
    end.new
  end
  let(:user) { stub('user') }

  before do
    helper.current_user = user
  end

  describe '#socialmedia_name(account)' do
    it 'should return the users name listed by the social media provider when that name is provided' do
      # stub user here

      helper.socialmedia_name('facebook').should == "Mark Zuckerberg"
    end
  end
end