Question

Starting my journey on TDD with Rspec and having some issues.
Can’t understand why my rspec fails on if … OR condition.

  def director
    @movie = Movie.find_by_id(params[:id])
    if @movie.nil? or @movie.director.empty?
      flash[:notice] = "The movie has no director info"
      redirect_to movies_path
    else
      # success
    end
  end  

Rspec test:

before ... #stubs
it 'assigns movies array in director action' do
    Movie.stub(:find_by_id).and_return(@movie)
    get "director", :id => 1
    ... 
end

Error:

  1) MoviesController assigns movies array in director action
     Failure/Error: get "director", :id => 1
     NoMethodError:
       You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
       You might have expected an instance of Array.
       The error occurred while evaluating nil.empty?

If record is not found, then @movie.nil? should satisfy the condition and @movie.director.empty? shouldn’t evaluated against; is that correct?

In this case I don’t care if there’s no such record or the director field of requested record is blank, I treat it the same way.

Appreciate your help.

---

UPDATE

I’ve removed some controller stuff into model like this:

controller:

  def director
    @movies = Movie.same_director_by_id(params[:id])
    if @movies.blank?
      redirect_to movies_path
    end
  end

movie:

  def self.same_director_by_id (id)
    movie = self.find_by_id(id)
    if movie.nil? or movie.director.blank?
      return []
    else
      return self.where("id != ?", id).find_all_by_director(movie.director)
    end
  end

rspec:

it 'assigns movies array in director action' do
    Movie.should_receive(:same_director_by_id).and_return([@movie])
    get "director", :id => 1
    assigns(:movies).should be_kind_of(Array)
end

Now all controller specs pass beautifully.
I’ll test model separately.

UPDATE 2:

The issue was that I stubbed :director on a Model, not on a mock!
apneadiving was correct.

Answer 1

As discussed in comments, it’s mandatory to mock/stub every object/method. directory was missing here.