I've been using rspec for testing rails apps for about a month now. However, I hadn't tried to spec out the views. I decided to starting specing out the views today, and ran into a small obstacle.
I am currently using restful authentication plugin and I have snippets in my view like:
<% if logged_in? %>
....
<% end %>
Everything is good, until I tried to write my first view test. Calling:
render "controller/template"
I received a missing method error on "logged_in?". The problem is that rspec views are tested in isolation from the controller. This means my include AuthenticatedSystem in the application controller doesn't get loaded and that's where the "logged_in?" method is mixed in.
I did find out that the application_helper.rb and <controller>_helper.rb (where <controller> is the current controller associated with the template being tested) get loaded, so I could define the "logged_in?" method in either of the two helper classes. But the problem with that is that I would have "logged_in?" defined in a couple of places just to run my rspecs.
Digging around in the rspec for rails code base, I found that you can get access to the controller via @controller and the template via @controller.template.
Then a light came on! I could stub out the call to logged_in? on the template like so:
@controller.template.stub!(:logged_in?).and_return(true)
After doing that, everything worked fine. I also found it came in handy for stubbing out other template calls.
