Running rspec from rails application code

Question

I've got a situation where I need to validate some regular expressions.

So, during my application run, I may want to test that a particular regex:

Contains no spaces
Contains only a certain number of capture groups
Does not use certain characters
Only contains a certain number of wildcards

rspec seems like the perfect tool for doing this. I realize that it's typically used to test application interfaces, assumptions and logic before an application is run, however. But, the natural syntax combined with the automatic reporting output would be nice to have.

Questions: Is this an appropriate use of rspec?

How can one call a description from within a running application?

Or, should I abandon this approach and simply write methods within my class to perform the validations?

Jesse Wolgamott · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-05 12:35:44Z

1

Using rspec in this way is highly discouraged and unusual. You should leave testing code in a :test group in your Gemfile and not reference it in your app.

Instead, use rails validations that your field matches a regex format, and then write tests in rspec to verify your validations.

answered Oct 5, 2011 at 12:35

Jesse Wolgamott

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4 Comments

wadesworld Over a year ago

Thanks for the feedback. The interesting thing about this situation is that the data will not be saved. The goal is to read the data from a file, validate the data and then discard it. Would the recommendation still stand?

David Chelimsky Over a year ago

@wadesworld - what should happen if the data is invalid?

Jesse Wolgamott Over a year ago

Yes, it still stands. I would not use 1 regex for your test, I would use a combination of validations -- the regex, for my tastes, would end up being too complex to be readable in the future.

wadesworld Over a year ago

The end goal is to produce a report showing whether the data was valid or invalid. So the app code will read in data, run tests on data, report results of tests

nathanvda · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-05 13:11:01Z

0

This is definitely something new: using rspec inside rails for validation. But for specific problems one tends to propose to use a DSL, and as such rspec is a DSL which might just perfectly suited for your job.

So if that is the case: why not, yes, go ahead. Be creative and find new ways to use the tools you have.

Just a small warning: from the few points you marked, the complexity does not seem to be too big, so make sure you are not using a bazooka to kill a fly. Rspec is a big and very powerful tool, tying in rspec to run during the rails process might not be entirely straightforward.

answered Oct 5, 2011 at 13:11

nathanvda

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Comments

squarism · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-05 19:02:29Z

If you want to generate a report, you could use the global after(:all) { puts "report goes here" } or after(:each). If you expect some of your data to blow up your tests, you can test for .should raise_exception. I imagine you'd be writing lots of exception handling to keep the expected failures out of the output. Logging the results to a database or a file might also be annoying. If you can, describe the test that you are doing on the data and then just parse the output of rspec at the end.

class Car
  attr_accessor :doors
end

describe "Car" do

  it "should have doors" do
    Car.new.should respond_to(:doors)
    fail("failing intentionally")
  end

  it "should pass this easily" do
    Car.new should_not be nil
  end

  after(:all) { puts "report here" }
end

You can see below that I have a description of the test that failed.

$ rspec rspec_fail.rb
F.report here

Failures:

  1) Car should have doors
     Failure/Error: fail("failing intentionally")
     RuntimeError:
       failing intentionally
     # ./rspec_fail.rb:9:in `block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'

Finished in 0.00052 seconds
2 examples, 1 failure

I would be easy enough to just make a report of the failures if this was testing text and regex's. Failure/Error: fail("Data has spaces") etc.

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