Can Rspec use instance variables in looping construct?

Question

I'm trying to use Rspec to loop through a series of very similar tests, but it's not working out for me right now. I have a hash of states and I want to test all of them, but I don't know the order they'll be in, so I've set it up like this:

before(:all) do
  @hash = {
    state_1 => {'item1' => 'a', 'item2' => 'b', 'item3' => 'c'},
    state_2 => {'item1' => 'd', 'item2' => 'e', 'item3' => 'f'},
    state_3 => {'item1' => 'g', 'item2' => 'h', 'item3' => 'i'}
  }
end

until @hash.empty? do
  context 'code does some stuff' do
    before(:all) do
      @state = <result of state determining function>
      @item1 = @hash[@state]['item1']
      @item2 = @hash[@state]['item2']
      @item3 = @hash[@state]['item3']
    end
    it 'does some stuff' do
      ...
    end
    after(:all) do
      @hash.delete(@state)
    end
  ...
end

When I run my rspec tests, however, I get an error that there is no method 'empty?' for nil:NilClass. So questions are, what am I doing wrong, and what is the preferred way to do something of this sort?

Thanks!

John Feminella · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-30 20:54:19Z

1

it looks like you're looking to use let, which recreates the variable for each context

edited Oct 30, 2014 at 20:54

John Feminella

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answered Oct 30, 2014 at 20:41

toolz

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1 Comment

carlmonday Over a year ago

I got rid of the before and instead used let(:hash) { {state_1 => .....}, and I changed all occurrences of @hash to hash, and now I get a different error: undefined local variable or method, NameError

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