Question

Suppose you have an ActiveRecord::Observer in one of your Ruby on Rails applications – how do you test this observer with rSpec?

Answer 1

You are on the right track, but I have run into a number of frustrating unexpected message errors when using rSpec, observers, and mock objects. When I am spec testing my model, I don’t want to have to handle observer behavior in my message expectations.

In your example, there isn’t a really good way to spec ‘set_status’ on the model without knowledge of what the observer is going to do to it.

Therefore, I like to use the ‘No Peeping Toms’ plugin. Given your code above and using the No Peeping Toms plugin, I would spec the model like this:

describe Person do    it 'should set status correctly' do      @p = Person.new(:status => 'foo')     @p.set_status('bar')     @p.save     @p.status.should eql('bar')   end end 

You can spec your model code without having to worry that there is an observer out there that is going to come in and clobber your value. You’d spec that separately in the person_observer_spec like this:

describe PersonObserver do   it 'should clobber the status field' do      @p = mock_model(Person, :status => 'foo')     @obs = PersonObserver.instance     @p.should_receive(:set_status).with('aha!')     @obs.after_save   end end  

If you REALLY REALLY want to test the coupled Model and Observer class, you can do it like this:

describe Person do    it 'should register a status change with the person observer turned on' do     Person.with_observers(:person_observer) do       lambda { @p = Person.new; @p.save }.should change(@p, :status).to('aha!)     end   end end 

99% of the time, I’d rather spec test with the observers turned off. It’s just easier that way.