Question

in rspec, I have a spec that looks something like this:

require 'spec_helper'

describe IncomingMailsController do

  include Devise::TestHelpers

  it "should find the correct text in the sample" do
  sample_text = '100s of these'
  target_text = 'find me'
   .... ALL Kinds of stuff to process (30+ lines)
   thread.content.should == 'find me'
  end

end

Is there a way with rspec, to allow me to somehow use all that logic in one block? And then create 100s of it “xxxxx” do, and pass that a variable being the sample text?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can put the it test blocks inside a loop, and run through a collection of all the times you want to each for (in the example below those items are in the search_items collection)

require 'spec_helper'

describe IncomingMailsController do

  include Devise::TestHelpers

  search_items.each do |item|
    it "should find the correct text (#{item}) in the sample" do
      sample_text = '100s of these'
      target_text = item
      .... ALL Kinds of stuff to process (30+ lines)
      thread.content.should == 'find me'
    end
  end

end

UPDATE

I saw on a comment to another answer in this threase that you have a directory with 100+ files of samples, you can get the list of filenames using Dir#glob. You can then use that in the loop to generate your it test cases.

UPDATE 2

  Dir.glob('/path/to/files/*.txt').each do |file_name|
    it "should find the correct text in the sample #{file_name}" do
      file_content = File.open(file_name, "rb")
      sample_text = '100s of these'
      target_text = 'fine me'
      .... ALL Kinds of stuff to process (30+ lines)
      thread.content.should == 'find me'
    end
  end

You might have to play with the full path of file_name but that should get you some of the way.