Shoulda Gets Busy with Your Controllers

A while back we released the Shoulda Plugin to help with testing your ActiveRecord models. Well, we’ve been using it in more and more of our projects, and we’ve just finished adding some super cool controller tests.

Check it out!

Controller Macros

Right off the bat, you get some pretty little test helpers:

class UsersControllerTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  context "on GET to :show for first record" do
    setup do
      get :show, :id => 1
    end

    should_assign_to :user
    should_respond_with :success
    should_render_template :show
    should_not_set_the_flash

    should "do something else really cool" do
      assert_equal 1, assigns(:user).id
    end
  end
end

That bit of code makes five functional tests, and is super easy to read. To take it a step further - if you’ve been a good boy and have kept to the latest restful standards in your controllers, then you’re in luck.

shouldberestful

You can produce an entire set of tests (over 40) for both html and xml formats through the should_be_restful helper.

class UsersControllerTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  load_all_fixtures

  def setup
    @controller = UsersController.new
    @request    = ActionController::TestRequest.new
    @response   = ActionController::TestResponse.new
    @user       = User.find(:first)
  end

  should_be_restful do |resource|
    resource.parent = :country
    resource.create.params = { :name => "bob",
      :email => 'bob@bob.com',
      :age => 13
    }
    resource.update.params = { :name => "sue" }
  end
end

Should_be_restful is very configurable, but as the name states, it’s only intended for testing restful controllers. We’ve finished tests for the HTML and XML formats, and RSS, YAML, and JSON will soon be on their way.

Check out the project page and the documentation for more information and examples.