Question

Ruby newbie here trying to get to grips with rspec, rails, cucumber.

I’m not sure why this is returning the following error:

1) User can be found by username
Failure/Error: user.should_not be_valid
NoMethodError:
    undefined method `valid?' for nil:NilClass
    # ./spec/models/user_spec.rb:26:in `block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'

From the following model spec file:

require 'spec_helper'

describe User do
  let(:user) { User.new(
      :username => 'username',
      :password => 'password'
    )
  }

  it "should be createable" do
    user.should be_valid
  end

  it "cannot have an empty username" do
    user.username = nil
    user.should_not be_valid
  end

  it "cannot have an empty password" do
    user.password = nil
    user.should_not be_valid
  end

  it "can be found by username" do
    user = User.find_by_username('username')
    user.should be_valid  
  end
  it "can be deleted"
end

I’m sure it’s something simple but I can’t figure it out?

Answer 1

In your let call you need to actually “create” the user. You just built it without saving. So when you call

user = User.find_by_username('username')

That is returning nil as the record is not saved and can’t be found.

Also, #find_by_username is part of Rails, you don’t really need to be testing that.