Question

So I’m fairly new to ruby in general, and I’m writing some rspec test cases for an object I am creating. Lots of the test cases are fairly basic and I just want to ensure that values are being populated and returned properly. I’m wondering if there is a way for me to do this with a looping construct. Instead of having to have an assertEquals for each of the methods I want to test.

For instace:

describe item, "Testing the Item" do

  it "will have a null value to start" do
    item = Item.new
    # Here I could do the item.name.should be_nil
    # then I could do item.category.should be_nil
  end

end

But I want some way to use an array to determine all of the properties to check. So I could do something like

propertyArray.each do |property|
  item.#{property}.should be_nil
end

Will this or something like it work? Thanks for any help / suggestions.

Answer 1

object.send(:method_name) or object.send("method_name") will work.

So in your case

propertyArray.each do |property|
  item.send(property).should be_nil
end

should do what you want.