Question

I’m using rspec, and having some problems. I’m getting the following error in rspec

  1) MoviesController find movies with same director should call the model method that searches for movie by director
     Failure/Error: get :samedirector, {:id => 1}
     RuntimeError:
       Called id for nil, which would mistakenly be 4 -- if you really wanted the id of nil, use object_id
     # ./app/controllers/movies_controller.rb:63:in `samedirector'
     # ./spec/controllers/movies_controller_spec.rb:11:in `block (3 levels) in <top (required)>'

This is my movies_controller_spec.rb

describe MoviesController do  
  describe 'find movies with same director' do  
    let(:movie) { Movie.create }  
    before {movie.id=1, movie.director = "Steven S", movie.title="Hello World"}  
    subject { movie }  
    it 'should call the model method that searches for movie by director' do  
      Movie.should_receive(:find).with("1")  
      #this get is passing a nil id  
      get :samedirector, {:id => movie.id}  
    end  
  end  
end  

and this is my MovieController.rb

def samedirector  
    movie = Movie.find(params[:id])  
    @director = movie.director  
  end  

Any help would be appreciated. This is a homework problem, so if you could give me more of the intuition and point to potential lines I’m doing wrong than solution code, that would be really helpful.

Update

I fixed it based on what you said, and just initialized it in

before (:each) do
  @movie = Movie.create(:director => "Steven S", :title=>"Hello World")
end  

However, I now have the following problem. Seems to be it isn’t recognizing that the director is Steven S in the controller. Not sure why.

Answer 1

When you do

Movie.should_receive(:find).with("1") 

you’re changing what happens when you do Movie.find(1). This replaces the orignal implementation (ie should_receive isn’t a test spy). In particular, the return value is nil (by default). This then breaks your app code, since it’s not expecting Movie.find to return nil

You can use and_return to control what value should be returned

Movie.should_receive(:find).with("1").and_return(movie)