Refactoring Rspec specs
- by Steve Weet
I am trying to cleanup my specs as they are becoming extremely repetitive.
I have the following spec
describe "Countries API" do
it "should render a country list" do
co1 = Factory(:country)
co2 = Factory(:country)
result = invoke :GetCountryList, "empty_auth"
result.should be_an_instance_of(Api::GetCountryListReply)
result.status.should be_an_instance_of(Api::SoapStatus)
result.status.code.should eql 0
result.status.errors.should be_an_instance_of Array
result.status.errors.length.should eql 0
result.country_list.should be_an_instance_of Array
result.country_list.first.should be_an_instance_of(Api::Country)
result.country_list.should have(2).items
end
it_should_behave_like "All Web Services"
it "should render a non-zero status for an invalid request"
end
The block of code that checks the status will appear in all of my specs for 50-60 APIs. My first thought was to move that to a method and that refactoring certainly makes things much drier as follows :-
def status_should_be_valid(status)
status.should be_an_instance_of(Api::SoapStatus)
status.code.should eql 0
status.errors.should be_an_instance_of Array
status.errors.length.should eql 0
end
describe "Countries API" do
it "should render a country list" do
co1 = Factory(:country)
co2 = Factory(:country)
result = invoke :GetCountryList, "empty_auth"
result.should be_an_instance_of(Api::GetCountryListReply)
status_should_be_valid(result.status)
result.country_list.should be_an_instance_of Array
result.country_list.first.should be_an_instance_of(Api::Country)
result.country_list.should have(2).items
end
end
This works however I can not help feeling that this is not the "right" way to do it and I should be using shared specs, however looking at the method for defining shared specs I can not easily see how I would refactor this example to use a shared spec.
How would I do this with shared specs and without having to re-run the relatively costly block at the beginning namely
co1 = Factory(:country)
co2 = Factory(:country)
result = invoke :GetCountryList, "empty_auth"
