On 9/4/07, Geoffrey Wiseman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > I come from the same background as you, so I hear where you're coming
> > from. We made a conscious decision, however, not to support custom
> > messages almost two years ago and I'm not sure if its ever even come
> > up before. If it has, it was a long time ago.
>
> [nod] Perhaps as I get into the mindset, I'll find this desire slips away.
>
> > If you follow the conventions of one expectation per example, and your
> > example is well named, this is less of a problem. Here's a common
> > idiom:
> >
> > describe Person do
> > def valid_attributes
> > {:name => 'joe smith'}
> > end
> > before(:each) do
> > @person = Person.new(valid_attributes)
> > end
> > it "should be valid with valid attributes" do
> > @person.should be_valid
> > end
> > it "should be invalid with no name" do
> > @person.name = nil
> > @person.should_not be_valid
> > end
> > end
>
> Using this as an example, if a new validation rule is added, this test will
> fail without indicating /why/. Sure, I can get that answer in other ways,
> but I'd hate to discover things like:
>
> it "should be valid with valid attributes" do
> # puts @person.errors if [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> @person.should be_valid
> end
>
> (Which I've seen when people have to repeatedly diagnose issues in a test;
> I'd prefer a failure message to the above)
>
> > Together, these different examples help to tell the whole story, and
> > when one example fails you know why it's failing - its just that the
> > message is in the example's name instead of a custom assertion
> > message.
>
> > Make sense?
>
> Yes and no; test isolation and good names is a decent practice even in
> XUnit, but clearly it's that much stronger in RSpec, and I'm in favour of
> that. However, I find that often test failures involve unexpected changes (
> e.g. the REST service didn't return a status code of 201, as you expected,
> because a validation rule changed and the validation failed), which aren't
> as easy to message.
>
> Still, i'm willing to give this approach a shot and see if this bothers me
> increasingly less.
Personally, I'm open to the idea of custom messages - I just have no
idea how that work syntactically. If you get to the point where you
really feel the need for that feature (or before that point) please
feel free to make suggestions about that.
Cheers,
David
>
> - Geoffrey
> --
> Geoffrey Wiseman
>
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