RSpec View Testing Problems

I've been using RSpec exclusively on my latest project. I'd say I'm still fairly new to it, but it has won me over for the time being. However, the view testing has been a real problem. You can test views quite easily and nicely with RSpec, however, when you do something subtly wrong, it can cause RSpec to fail without any visible error! In fact, Autotest doesn't report a failure at all, and the only way I know it is failing is either I pay close attention to the number of examples it said it ran, or more likely, my cruisecontrol.rb CI server will actually fail (because it detects the commands exit status).

For example, while Autotest says everything is fine, the CI server will show something like this (note for easier reading I've trimmed this a bit):

/widgets/index.html.erb
- should render list of widgets

/bobbles/index.html.erb

Finished in 4.977586 seconds

175 examples, 0 failures
rake aborted!
Command /usr/bin/ruby1.8 -I"/var/cruisecontrolrb/projects/myproject/work/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib"  "/var/cruisecontrolrb/projects/myproject/work/vendor/plugins/rspec/bin/spec" "spec/controllers/bobbles_controller_spec.rb" ... --options /var/cruisecontrolrb/projects/myproject/work/spec/cruisecontrol_rcov.opts failed

(See full trace by running task with --trace)

As you can see, RSpec is reporting 0 failures, yet rake fails. This is because in reality RSpec is returning an exit code of 1 instead of 0. But, looking at the output, it's certainly not revealing. Running with --trace is of no help either.

What I now know to pay attention to in situations like this is the fact that that last spec it ran, the /bobbles/index.html.erb one has no examples listed under it. That is thus the culprit (you can also argue that it's the last thing to "run" and then rake fails, so it's likely in this, etc.).

The real pain comes when you try to figure out what the heck is causing this. You have zero feedback, and no way that I know of to somehow debug or inspect the test to see what's failing. In my experience to date with these, it boils down to some problem in your mocks and stubs, but this can be difficult to figure out. I admit, the one that prompted me to write this blog entry is one I've still yet to figure out, and finally just punted on.

I've been hearing a lot about not testing views, or testing very little of the views. I agree in general on this, and am now looking into using Webrat to do integration testing to really test "view" functionality, and leave the rest of my view testing mostly to testing my helpers, controllers, and models. Here are a couple of blog entries related to all this:

• Err the blog (via comments) discussion on view testing techniques. This is a good read.


• Rubby Russell's blog entry on testing your views with RSpec.


• Integration Testing in Ruby with RSpec's Story Automation Framework by David Chelimsky (PDF)