In the below spec, I want to test that for a Notification instance, running the destructive method #mark_as_dismissed will change the has_been_read column to true. How do you do that while keeping the test nice and terse?
context "#mark_as_dismissed" do
subject { create(:notification) }
subject.mark_as_dismissed # How do I specify this
its(:has_been_read) { should be_true }
end
There's multiple ways to write tests and different preferred syntaxes, so this is quite an opinionated answer.
Following your style, it would look more like this:
describe "#mark_as_dismissed" do
subject { create(:notification) }
before { subject.mark_as_dissmissed }
its(:has_been_read) { should be_true }
end
Mine would be more like this:
describe "#mark_as_dismissed" do
let(:notification) { create(:notification) }
it "marks the notification as read" do
notification.mark_as_dissmissed
notification.has_been_read.should be_true
end
end
syntatic sugar: Rspec allows a special syntax for methods returning booleans. I would have to test it, I am not sure it would work in this case but perhaps you can do something like:
# for the first alternative
it { should have_been_read }
# for the second alternative
it "marks the notification as read" do
notification.mark_as_dissmissed
notification.should have_been_read
end
Bonus points To remove the db dependency you can just 'build' the notification instead of using 'create' (which persists the model in the database). If the #mark_as_dismissed method does not need the db (can do a non persistent update), then the test should still work.
build(:notification) # instead of create(:notification)
