Question

Need some help understanding:

In rspec-2, every example and example group comes with metadata
information like the file and line number on which it was declared,
the arguments passed to describe and it, etc. This metadata can be
appended to through a hash argument passed to describe or it, allowing
us to pre and post-process each example in a variety of ways.

https://github.com/rspec/rspec-core/blob/master/features/Upgrade.md — «Metadata!» section

I’d like to have the following shortcut:

describe 'DELETE destroy', :as => :admin do
  it 'destroys...' do
    # ...
  end
end

for

describe 'DELETE destroy as admin' do
  before { login_as :admin }

  it 'destroys...' do
    # ...
  end
end

Is metadata-based example pre/post-processing appropriate in the case or it was made for «external» things like filtering?

Answer 1

I believe this should work:

spec_helper.rb

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.before(:each, :as => :admin) do |example|
    login_as :admin
  end
end

Then your spec should work as expected with the :as => :admin option. See also this article.