Question

I’m in the process of learning Ruby on Rails, so treat me like a total neophyte, because I am.

I’ve got a User model with some associated RSpec tests, and the following test fails:

require 'spec_helper'
describe User do

    it 'should require a password' do
        User.new({:email => '[e-mail]', :password => '', :password_confirmation => ''}).should_not be_valid
    end

end

The relevant part of the User model looks like this:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    ...
    validates :password, :presence => true,
                         :confirmation => true,
                         :length => { :minimum => 6 }
    ...
end

Here’s the catch: if I run User.new(...).valid? from a Rails console using the arguments above, it returns false as expected and shows the correct errors (password is blank).

I was using spork/autotest and I restarted both to no avail, but this test also fails even running it directly with rspec. What am I doing wrong here?

EDIT

I tried a few more things with the test. This fails:

        u = User.new({:email => '[e-mail]', :password => '', :password_confirmation => ''})
        u.should_not be_valid

So does this:

        u = User.new({:email => '[e-mail]', :password => '', :password_confirmation => ''})
        u.valid?
        u.errors.should_not be_empty

This passes, confirming that :password is indeed blank:

        u = User.new({:email => '[e-mail]', :password => '', :password_confirmation => ''})
        u.password.should == ''

Answer 1

So, it’s actually spork that is causing the problem. You can turn caching off, so that it won’t need restarting every time :

http://ablogaboutcode.com/2011/05/09/spork-testing-tip-caching-classes

I think this is what happens :

ruby-1.9.2-p180 :020 > u = User.new
 => #<User id: nil, email: ...
ruby-1.9.2-p180 :021 > u.errors
 => {} 
ruby-1.9.2-p180 :022 > u.save
 => false 
ruby-1.9.2-p180 :023 > u.errors
 => {:email=>["can't be blank", "can't be blank"], ...} 

In short, if you change new to create, it will work 🙂 I think that this happens because the matcher be_valid checks on the model validation errors. There can be a deeper explanation, but i think that if you use create instead of new, it will work.

EDIT : I have a be_valid_verbose version that might help. Just create a ‘be_valid_verbose.rb’ file in your rspec/custom_matchers folder, and inside it write :

RSpec::Matchers.define :be_valid_verbose do
  match do |model|
    model.valid?
  end

  failure_message_for_should do |model|
    "#{model.class} expected to be valid but had errors:n #{model.errors.full_messages.join("n ")}"
  end

  failure_message_for_should_not do |model|
    "#{model.class} expected to have errors, but it did not"
  end

  description do
    "be valid"
  end
end

Now check against be_valid_verbose instead of be_valid. It will hopefully present you with some more information on what is happening in your case.