Hi all,
Like everyone (?), I use nested contexts to keep my specs well organised and
tidy.
However, I have a problem. I have various sets of specs that needs to
perform very time-expensive operations to set up the fixtures that will be
examined in the tests. Two specific examples: testing access control logic
(requires creating a whole tree of items to verify the correct access level
against each item), and project archival (which creates a project, fills it
with test data, archives/zips the project contents, then unzips them for
examination).
I tried using before(:all) to set up those costly fixtures, however I hit
upon a feature of rspec that made that less than successful:
When using before(:all) along with nested contexts, rspec actually re-runs
the before(:all) before each sub-context. So if, like me, you have your
specs neatly organised in sub-contexts, the before(:all) is actually re-run
many times.
Interestingly, when a before(:all) is run in the root context, rspec does
not actually remove the data from the database when re-running the
before(:all). "Great," I then thought, "I can just detect whether the data
is created and decide whether or not to create the objects on that basis".
Not so fast, though: Rspec may not clobber the database, but it does clobber
instance variables. In the case of the access control test, there's about 40
different instance variables, so keeping track of them all manually in some
global variable outside of rspec would be messy to say the least...
So my question is, is there any workaround for successfully using
before(:all) and nested specs, so that code like the following works and
doesn't run the expensive operation more than once:
describe "Some functionality" do
before(:all) do
@variable = some_expensive_operation
end
it "should do something" do
@variable.should do_something
end
describe "in a specific context" do
it "should do another thing" do
@variable.should do_another_thing
end
end
end
Worth noting that I'm quite happy to give up the ability to have before
blocks in the sub-contexts in order to ensure that the expensive operation
is only run once...
Your thoughts most welcome... (including, perhaps, telling me that I'm Doing
It Wrong)
Daniel Tenner
http://www.woobius.com
http://danieltenner.com
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