I wanted to call this section “Booty”; you might call it “Recipes” or “Cookbook”, but I don’t. Anyways, “loot” goes with the theme of rioting and since Ruby is the Vegas of languages1 we need to stay themed.
If you find yourself writing similar assertions or even contexts within your application, feel free to include some new methods into Riot::Context that clean that duplication up. Yes, yes, simple example time. First you start with the redundant stuff:
context "Messages controller:" do
hookup do # authenticate
session(:user, {:email => "john@doe.com", :name => "John Doe"}) # assumes we're using rack-test
end
context "retrieving list for logged in user"
setup { get("/user/messages") }
# ...
end # retrieving list for logged in user
end # Messages controller
context "Followers controller:" do
hookup do # authenticate
session(:user, {:email => "jane@doe.com", :name => "John Doe"})
end
context "retrieving list for logged in user"
setup { get("/user/followers") }
# ...
end # retrieving list for logged in user
end # Followers controller
It’d be nice if we could just have an authenticate method to call in that hookup spot. Of course, we could write a helper to do some of it for us, but we want something more elegant than even that. This would be better:
context "Messages controller:" do
authenticate("john@doe.com")
context "retrieving list for logged in user"
setup { get("/user/messages") }
# ...
end # retrieving list for logged in user
end # Messages controller
context "Followers controller:" do
authenticate("jane@doe.com")
context "retrieving list for logged in user"
setup { get("/user/followers") }
# ...
end # retrieving list for logged in user
end # Followers controller
Yep, better. Cleaner and very concise. Now, to make this happen you need to define the following in your teststrap.rb or some other library that’s loaded in at runtime:
module SweetApp
module RiotContext
def authenticate(email)
hookup do
session(:user, {:email => email, :name => "John Doe"})
end
end
end # RiotContext
end # SweetApp
Riot::Context.instance_eval { include SweetApp::RiotContext }
If you’re like me, you like using helpers for all the reasons I’ve mentioned before. However, there are times when you want to have a helper that generates a new instance of something, but only one for the scope of the context.
context "Making some time" do
helper(:right_now) { @right_now ||= Time.new }
helper(:hours_from_now) do |hours|
(right_now + (hours * 3600)).strftime("%Y%m%d-%H%M")
end
# ...
end # Making some time
I see you pointing your finger and screaming “Instance variable … instance variable … ya ya ya!” Whatever, sue me. I get to say right_now everywhere else.
I have no idea what “the Vegas of languages” means, but it sounds awesome anyways.
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