Question

I’m writing tests for my rails app and I’ve found out that as almost an the tests are run on the set of some n variables, I can write them as follows:

[var1, var2, …].each do   
    describe … do
     .
     .
    end

    it … do
     .
     .
    end
end

and so on. But I can’t find a way how to put all that array into a variable, so I can just use variables.each do ….

I’ve tried before(:each), before(:all) and just a declaration of and instance variable (one that starts with @-sign) in a describe group, but all my tries were useless.

Answer 1

Declare variables in the Rspec.configure block:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.add_setting :variables, :default =>  [1, 2]
end

And use it inside your specs like this:

RSpec.configuration.variables.each do |i|
end

You can also declare variables outside of the RSpec configuration block like in the example below, but since you probably already have this block, better keep things clean.

RSpec.configuration.add_setting :variables, :default =>  [1, 2]