Cucumber allows you to format the results you get from running your features. With Cucumber 0.5, the Rails specific code was extracted out into a separate gem called cucumber-rails. With it came a smarter cucumber.yml file which now defaults to the “progress” format instead of “pretty”.
Archive for the ‘Testing’ Category
Pickle Tables
In Rails, Testing on November 26, 2009 at 12:12 amFollowing on from my original and followup articles on using Pickle with Cucumber, a brand new version of Pickle is now available. Version 0.2.0 now gives you the ability to use Pickle with Cucumber’s multiline step argument tables. This means you can now do the following with Pickle:
Given a company exists And another company: "rubyflare" exists And the following people exist: | name | age | employed | company | | Digby | 13 | false | the first company | | Ethyl | 27 | true | company: "rubyflare" | Then the following people should exist: | name | age | | Digby | 13 | | Ethyl | 27 | And the 2nd person should be one of company: "rubyflare"'s employees
You can quickly create multiple objects in an easy to read fashion rather than filling your scenarios with multiple lines of “an another user exists …”. As an added bonus you can also use Pickle references within these tables. In the example above, we are creating new people objects and associating them to the companies using the Pickle references for these company objects.
Again, I’ll just point out that the above example required no custom step definitions. I didn’t have to write any step definitions! Pickle takes care of the grunt work leaving you free to focus on your domain specific scenario steps.
Other recent improvements with Pickle include:
- an email helper for mapping names to email addresses similar to paths
- its own separate configuration file (pickle.rb) – pickle no longer adds code to features/support/env.rb
I’ve also updated my pickle_example project to the latest version and have added the above example scenario. Feel free to clone it and use it to explore the benefits of using Pickle.
More Pickle Action
In Rails, Testing on November 3, 2009 at 8:00 amIn a previous blogpost I championed the benefits of using Pickle with Cucumber to speed up your BDD. Recently, I was able to contribute back to Pickle in a small way with the following two changes:
- you can now use negative numbers in numeric field values when creating objects, and
- you can use some extra default step definitions to verify the non-existence of objects
This means you can do things like this in your plain text cucumber steps:
Given a user exists with name: "Digby", bank_balance: -43.25
And if you need to, you can also be explicit with the positive sign:
And another user exists with name: "Miranda", bank_balance: +86.50
The extra step definitions allow you to do the following:
Then a user should not exist with name: "Maya" And the first user should not be one of the last user's debtors And the last user should not be the first user's creditor
These are the “not” versions of some of the existing default step definitions. I found that I was needing these in my Rails projects and thought they would be good to have in the standard Pickle. Ian White, the creator of Pickle, agreed.
It feels good to contribute back to an open source project, even in a small way, and I encourage you all to try to do so as well.
Pickle my Cucumber!
In Rails, Testing on October 28, 2009 at 8:00 amIf you are using Cucumber then I would highly recommend using Ian White’s fantastic little add-on called Pickle.
Pickle makes life in the Cucumber world so much easier by providing you with convenient step definitions that take care of common object operations leaving you free to focus on the fun stuff. Combined with the pre-packaged Webrat steps you can dramatically reduce the number of step definitions you need to write.
Testing Sphinx with Cucumber
In Rails, Testing on September 2, 2009 at 8:00 amFor awhile, all of my Cucumber features that involved search were marked as TODO. The search worked but I had no integration tests for it because the default setup of Cucumber uses the transactional fixtures setting to run each scenario inside of a transaction to ensure that the database starts in the same known state for each scenario. Unfortunately ThinkSphinx won’t work with this setup. Thankfully, Brandon from opensoul.org wrote up a great post on how to modify your Cucumber setup to get it working.
Further to Brandon’s post, here’s how I’ve incorporated running search features with Cucumber… Read the rest of this entry »
Less Brittle View Specs
In Rails, Testing on August 26, 2009 at 8:00 amView specs are often misunderstood and ignored (poor little things) however I believe they can be useful. A big criticism of view specs is that they are brittle – when your html changes, they break. Another is that Cucumber makes them redundant. A lot depends on how you write them. Read the rest of this entry »
$600 Mistake
In Business, Testing on August 12, 2009 at 8:00 amDo you test? Do you test all the time (TATFT)? Can you afford to lose $600? Read the rest of this entry »
Use response.capture instead
In Rails, Testing on July 15, 2009 at 8:00 amRecently, I upgraded an app from Rails 2.1.0 to Rails 2.3.2. First, I upgraded rspec and rspec-rails to 1.2.7, raked my specs and they all passed. But after I upgraded to Rails 2.3.2, one particular spec failed with the following error message:
"undefined method downcase' for :extra_info:Symbol"
Testing flash.now with RSpec
In Rails, Testing on July 12, 2009 at 9:56 pmA recent Rails upgrade created some failing specs. One spec in particular caused me some frustration. It was a simple controller spec that was verifying the message of a flash.now warning. It worked find in Rails 2.1.0 but was failing in Rails 2.3.2. The solution was to simply inspect the response object!
