Question

I’m trying to do some things with rspec and I’m not able to access the variables I need in the places I need them. For example:

describe "some things" do
  it "should have things in App" do
    App.things.should_not be_nil #no problems here
    # puts App.things.count
    # => 10
  end

 # puts App.things.count
 # => 0
 App.things.each do |thing|
   #this doesn't work at all as App.things is empty 
   it "#{thing.title} should have an account number" do
      thing.acc_no.should_not be_nil  
   end
 end

I guess this occurs because of the time the different blocks are called. Or maybe I’m missing the point completely.

I need to iterate over ‘things’ and make an assertion about each one, but I can’t do that because things doesn’t have any elements in the context of the describe block, only within the it block.

Any help?

Answer 1

It seems you’re doing it wrong: why test every single value of a collection?

• create some fixtures and test that App has the correct number of created objects

• use one of the created fixtures to test that has correct values, that runs validations, etc…

at least, you can use rspec’s shared examples to repeat common tests:

http://blog.davidchelimsky.net/2010/11/07/specifying-mixins-with-shared-example-groups-in-rspec-2/