Changes in Chatterl

I haven’t worked on Chatterl for a few months but there are some fundemental changes that had been made back in March, apologies for the slow update but honestly I haven’t had much time with learning Rails & freelance work.

Summary

Well the main changes in chatterl are the following:

• Message storage
• Registration
• Introduction of unit tests
• CWIGA now RESTFUL
• API calls

I’ll go over each section, highlighting the main changes & who it affects Chatterl as a whole.

Meet CWIGA

After implementing Chatterl’s basic functionality (see chatterl post). The next step was to create to implement CWIGA, Chatterl Web Interface Gateway API. With this new module Chatterl is able to be interacted with purely via HTTP. The first implementation was rough, the original source can be found here, though it allowed me to get a decent understanding of mochiweb at the time helped me produce this article. After implementing unit tests to cover the project as a whole I felt comfortable to make a few fundamental changes to CWIGA’s API and requests to Chatterl.

Registration

I’ve added very basic registration functionality to Chatterl, allowing users to register to the system, giving them the ability to retrieve archived messages & later creation of their own chat groups. In hindsight I’d like to move this functionality to the front-end (which I’ll more than likely be in Rails).

Message Storage

Again this was more experimental on my part and something I would like to move over to couchDB when I get the chance, for the moment, Chatterluses mnesia to store users messages when they are not logged into the system.

Added test cases

One of the main issues I’ve been having with Sinan more than anything else, was seperating my tests from the source code. I really hated the idea of having test & implementation code mixed in, so I stayed away from any kind of real testing until I got my head around it. Thanks to Kev Smith’s own code, I finally got my head around EUnit, which I posted a short post on here.

Before I was comfortable with implementing any more functionality I had set out to cover as much of Chatterl’s code as possible. In doing so I uncovered a number of silly little bugs (oversights) in the coding logics & made the necessary changes.

General cleanup

The way chatterl is called has also been improved, instead of having to go into erl you can simple run ./start-server.sh within the cd _build/development/apps/chatterl-0.1.2.0/ directory. This will start up all the processes need to use chatterl.

CWIGA is setup to listen on port 9000, so you can call it using curl or via a browser of your choice. It accepts XML & JSON requests & has been made more RESTful.

Hopefully in the near future I’ll have time to rewrite the code base and improve on the basic functionality but for the meantime I hope this helps others as much as its been an experience for me.

Jumping on the Rails Pt.5 – Veggie validations

So if you’ve been following along from the other parts of the series, you’d remember that we have been building a project story builder using cucumber and BDD. So far we have learnt how to use the process to flesh out functionality from the outside in and generate the basic functionality for our application, this part of the series will focus on saving our project and validating its data using the same process.

Although it may seem that we haven’t covered much ground in the last two parts, as we build up on our steps, the less we will have to do later. You’ll see what I mean shortly.

So lets move on to our next scenario, our projects needs to be able to save & have its data validated, we’ll start with the below scenario.

Scenario: When submitting the form the user must be alerted if the title is not present
  	Given an activated user logged in as 'reggie'
  	When I click new project
	And fill in the new project form without a title
	And submit the form
	Then the project will not be save
	And a validation message will be displayed

So we’ll add this snippet to our

projects.feature

So our first step to implement is filling in the form without a title, so lets get that step out the way.

registere_user_steps.rb

When /^fill in the new project form without a title$/ do
  fill_in 'project_description', :with => 'This project will help us manage stuff'
  fill_in 'project_aim', :with => 'To provide a service'
end

Strange, our test passed, why is that? Well if you remember from the last post, we didn’t implement the save functionality & we haven’t got any validation in place. Either way our tests are passing, so lets move on to the next.

When /^submit the form$/ do
  submit_form 'new_project'
end

Again our tests are passing but that ok, it’s what we expect, we have already implemented the submission process. So we can happily move on to the next step.

Then /^a flash the message will be displayed$/ do
  flash.should contain "A project must have a title"
end

Aha, our first failure, we haven’t implemented a validation message yet, so lets open up our project controller spec and create a few specs.

Here’s what we want:

• It should save if it is valid
• It should not save the project if it is not valid
• It should display a validation error if no title is present

Here’s a rough outline of what we need to spec out

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../spec_helper'

describe ProjectsController do
  it "should save if it is valid"
  it "should not save"
  it "should display a validation error"
end

If you notice there’s alot of repeation here, as we love being DRY, well restructure this a little

• a valid project
  • should save if it is valid
• an invalid project
  • should not save
  • It should display a validation error

Nice, now that reads better & we have a layout for our specs, lets see how this effects our specs layout.

describe ProjectsController do
	describe "POST create"
	  context "a valid project"
		it "should save"
	  end
	  context "an invalid project" do
	        it "should not save"
		it "should display a validation error"
	  end
	end
end

So our project controller spec now looks like the code above, as we can see, our specs are a lot more expressive in this fashion and allow others to quickly understand what a tests is supposed to do.

describe ProjectsController do
  describe "POST, create" do
    before(:each) do
      @project = mock_model(Project,
				:title=>"A project",
				:null_object=>true).as_new_record
      Project.stub!(:new).and_return @project
    end
    context "a valid project" do
      before(:each) do
        @project.stub!(:save).and_return true
        post :create
      end

      it "should save" do
	 @project.save.should eql true
     end
     it "should display a success flash message" do
      	flash.should contain "You have successfully created your new project"
     end
   end

   context "title is not present" do
    it "should not save the story"
   end

  end
end

For those that didn’t notice we’ve refactored our controller spec a little, firstly we’ve added a project mock and stubbed out its call to new. We’ve also added a spec to make sure that we can save our project, this passes automatically seeing as we implemented this code earlier via step definitions.

Now lets create our failing spec:

context "an invalid project" do
  before(:each) do
    @project.stub!(:title).and_return nil
    post :create
  end

  it "should not save the story" do
    @project.save.should eql false
  end

end

Here we basically make sure that we don’t get redirected to the projects info page, as it should not be save & we render the form again.

Now we have our condition to save our project, lets setup our validation we still need to get this passing, we need to add validation to our model, so lets open that and add the following:

validates_presence_of :title

Doing so makes our test pass, now on to our next step, we’ll come back to our spec in a sec.

Now we still have a few more steps to run through, these should be pretty simple though.

Then /^a validation message will be displayed$/ do
  response.should have_selector(:li, :content => "Title can't be blank")
end

To fix this we won’t bother with any spec’s, we’ll just add the following snippet to our new projects form:

<%= error_messages_for :project %>

All our scenario’s are now all passing and we can happily move on. Ok, now your probably wondering, hell what was all that effort for, we only setup validation for the title but we created crap loads of code.

It’s true, we setup quite a bit in the last post but in this one, we’ll see how much of a benefit that little bit of leg work was in a sec. Lets get a little ambitious and add to scenario to our projects.feature file.

Scenario: When submitting the form the user must be alerted if the description is not present
  	Given an activated user logged in as 'reggie'
	When I visit the home page
	And I click new project
	And fill in the new project form without a description
	And submit the form
	Then a validation message will be displayed say 'Description can't be blank'

Scenario: When submitting the form the user must be alerted if the aim is not present
  	Given an activated user logged in as 'reggie'
	When I visit the home page
	And I click new project
	And fill in the new project form without a aim
	And submit the form
	Then a validation message will be displayed say 'Aim can't be blank'

Running cucumber quickly we notice that we only have 5 steps to complete our scenario’s. Now if you remember we already created a step to cover validation of messages, wouldn’t it be nice if we could use that same step to cover our the other validation messages.

As we know we going to need this step in a second & our tests are running, lets do a little refactor our previous scenario so that it will cover the other validation messages as well. Change the last step to match the snippet below.

Then a validation message will be displayed say 'Title can't be blank'

Now we refactor its associated step to look like the following:

Then /^a validation message will be displayed say '(.*)'$/ do |message|
  response.should have_selector :li, :content => message
end

Here we’re telling cucumber to take the regular expression and pass it as the ‘message’, this nice little feature not only helps refactor our previous step, run cucumber again the other validation message steps will now cover too, how cool is that

Using this method can save us a lot of time when it comes to writing scenario,s as well as helping us cover a lot ground quickly. Having said that take care when writting your steps, it’s not hard to find yourself lost, trying to work out why a step is not working. With that said, explicit names help to alleviate this no end.

Now with that said let’s move along.

When /^fill in the new project form without a description$/ do
  fill_in 'project_title', :with => 'new project'
  fill_in 'project_aim', :with => 'To provide a service'
end

As we have defined the step for submitting the button all the leg work is already done and we are greated by an error. We’ll we didnt get the validation message, so we’ll add this below snippet to our Project model.

validates_presence_of :description

We’re all passing again & we only have one more step to roll out, nice!

When /^fill in the new project form without a aim$/ do
  fill_in 'project_title', :with => 'new project'
  fill_in 'project_description', :with => 'This project will help us manage stuff'
end

Again we get the same error, so this time we added validation for our projects aim.

validates_presence_of :aim

We now have a fully functionality CRUD for our projects, we’ll look into making this more functional, adding scenarios to our project.

I’ve decided to put the code for this series on github partly to help myself remember what I’m learning here but also for others see the code in action & contribute to. I’d love input on the series and and suggestions on improvements as a whole.

Jumping on the Rails Pt.4 – Spec’n our form

Well carrying on from the previous post, we’ll focus on some actual functionality in this post & start on creating the functionality for users to create new projects. As always we’ll start off with our feature:

	Feature: As a registered user I must be able to create projects
	  In order to create a new project I must be logged in
	  As a registered user
	  I want I want to be able to create new projects

		Scenario: A registered user must be able to create projects
		  Given an activated user logged in as 'reggie'
		  When I click new project
			And fill in the new project form
		  Then I should get confirmation of the successful creation

As we’re using restful-authentication’s stories we can save our selves a step , as well as having knowing that the user will be logged in.

This leads us to our next step, we need to make sure that we can click the new project link, so that we can actually create our new project, so we take our snippet & modify it to look like the example below.

	When /^I click new project$/ do
	  visit "/projects/new"
	end

Now that we have our first failing test

No route matches "/projects/new" with {:method=>:get} (ActionController::RoutingError)

We need to set up a route for a projects controller.

map.resource :projects

Now we’ll get another expected error

uninitialized constant ProjectsController (NameError)

So we should create projects_controller.rb,

class ProjectsController < ActionController::Base
  def new

  end
end

We’ll finally need to create our new template.

Missing template projects/new.erb in view path app/views (ActionView::MissingTemplate)

Once you’ve created the template, it’s finally time to jump down into our view specs, we’ll start with the view first. So we will use the welcome indexes view spec to start with:

/PROJECT/spec/view/welcome/index.html.erb_spec.rb

Now there are a few things here that we not specified in the our story:

• a guest user should not see the new projects link
• only registered users can see the new projects link

now for those of you that have never created a spec before, we’ll start off slowly.

All specs have the following template

	require File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../../spec_helper')

	describe "something" do
	end

Now the first line brings in our specs helper which basically sets up rspec for us, the next significant line is:

	describe "welcome/index.html.erb" do
	end

Within this we describe the things we are testing, in this case the index view of our welcome page.

With the basics out of the way, we’ll start by setting up the first test.

   it "should have a sign up link" do
     response.should have_selector("a", :content => "Sign up")
   end

This test should pass straight away seeing as we haven’t added the link yet. Next we’ll do a little refactoring as our specs are now defining different types of user actions, our code now look like this:

	require File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../../spec_helper')

	describe "/welcome/index" do
	  context "viewing as a unregistered user" do
	    before(:each) do
	      render
	    end
	    it "should have a sign up link" do
	      response.should have_selector("a", :content => "Sign up")
	    end

	    it "should not have a new project link" do
	      response.should_not have_selector("a", :content => "New Project")
	    end
	  end

	  context "viewing as a registered user" do
	  end
	end

Now we’re wrapped our specs in context blocks, i’ve done this basically to help visually and mentally tell the difference between the two blocks of test, the first context block focusses on users that are not registered, whilst the second deals with specs concentrating on users viewing the index page as a registered user.

Now that the refactoring is out of the way lets deal with our next spec.

	context "viewing as a registered user" do
    it "should be able to see the new project link" do
      response.should have_selector("a", :content => "New Project")
    end
  end

Our tests will now fail so now its time to get our test to pass.

	<a href="/project">New Project</a>

I know, we can make this a lot more Railsy but let concerntratet on the matter at hand, we still have a failing test.

	'/welcome/index should not have a new project link' FAILED
	expected following output to omit a New Project:

Our initially passing test is now failing, lets get that to pass and move along.

	context "viewing as a registered user" do
    before(:each) do
      template.stub!(:current_user).and_return mock_model(User)
      render
    end
    it "should be able to see the new project link" do
      response.should have_selector("a", :content => "New Project")
    end
  end

Our spec is passing but out definition is still failing, thought we are making some progress, we are greated by our next friendly error.

	When I click new project                                  # features/step_definitions/registered_users_step.rb:2
    No route matches "/projects/new" with {:method=>:get} (ActionController::RoutingError)

Well we don’t have a route for our project, so lets get that setup, we add the following to

PROJECT/config/routes.rb

:

	map.resource :projects

With our route now setup, we have another error:

	When I click new project                                  # features/step_definitions/registered_users_step.rb:2
	      uninitialized constant ProjectsController (NameError)

That seems simple enough, we just need to create a controller for our projects, creating

PROJECT/app/controllers/projects_controller.rb

:

	class ProjectsController < ApplicationController

	end

Our tests run again but wait? yet another error:

	When I click new project                                  # features/step_definitions/registered_users_step.rb:2
	      No action responded to new. Actions: authorized?, current_user, and logged_in? (ActionController::UnknownAction)

Oh yeah, we need to create the new method block:

	class ProjectsController < ApplicationController
	  def new

	  end
	end

Now we run the tests again, next our tests tell us to create a view for our project.

	When I click new project                                  # features/step_definitions/registered_users_step.rb:2
	      Missing template projects/new.erb in view path app/views (ActionView::MissingTemplate)

So lets create the template

PROJECT/views/projects/new.html.erb

. Our tests are now passing and we can move on to the next step.

Before we jump in, we take a step back and think about what type of information we want to store in our project.

Well we certainly want a project title & we could do with a small description of what the project is about. It would also be nice for the project to have aims.

Ok, now that we have a rough idea of what data we want to store in our project, it’s time to setup our definition.

	When /^fill in the new project form$/ do
	  fill_in 'project_title', :with => 'new project'
	  fill_in 'project_description', :with => 'This project will help us manage stuff'
	  fill_in 'project_aim', :with => 'To provide a service'
	  submit_form 'new_project'
	end

So now we have our first error:

	Could not find field: "projects_title" (Webrat::NotFoundError)

We need to create a field with the id projects_title. So lets dip down into our view specs to step out this functionality.

We create

PROJECT/specs/views/projects/new.html.erb_spec.rb

first and the add the following code:

	require File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../../spec_helper')

	describe "/projects/new.html.erb" do

	  it "should have a form" do
			@project = mock_model(Project)
	    assigns[:project] = @project
	    render
	    response.should have_tag("form[action=/project][method=post]") do
	      with_tag('input#project_title[name=?]', "project[title]")
	      with_tag('textarea#project_description[name=?]', "project[description]")
	      with_tag('textarea#project_aim[name=?]', "project[aim]")
	    end
	  end
	end

Now this is a little involved but we’re basically looking for a form which contains a text field and two textarea’s, which will store our title, description & project aim. I also mocked out the project model from the jump, though it’s a bit naughty to do this all the time, I knew I was going to need a Project model here, so I just mocked it out.

We now get the following error:

	'/projects/new.html.erb should have a form' FAILED
	Expected at least 1 element matching "form[action='/project'][method='post']", found 0.
	<false> is not true.

This is basically telling us need to now create our form. So we create our new view

PROJECT/app/views/projects/new.html.rb

and add the following code:

	<% form_for @project do |f| -%>

	<% end -%>

Next we get the following error:

	NameError in '/projects/new.html.erb should have a form'
	uninitialized constant Project

So this error tells us we need a new project to pass the to the form, so we’ll add it to make our controller look like below

	class ProjectsController < ApplicationController
	  def new
	    @project = Project.new
	  end
	end

We’ll get a similar error if we don’t create our actual model, so lets quickly do that know:

	class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
	end

And we’ll need to create our migration table also.

	class CreateProject < ActiveRecord::Migration
	  def self.up
	    create_table "users", :force => true do |t|
	      t.column :title,                    :string
	      t.column :description,              :text
	      t.column :aim,                      :text
	      t.column :created_at,               :datetime
	      t.column :updated_at,               :datetime
	    end
	  end

	  def self.down
	    drop_table "users"
	  end
	end

And run rake to migrate our changes:

	rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test

Now we make our title spec form spec pass it time to deal with the projects data, so on to our next test.

	'/projects/new.html.erb should have a form' FAILED
	Expected at least 1 element matching "field#projects_title[name='projects[title]']", found 0.
	<false> is not true.

So here we are being told that the title does not exist so lets create it, our view file now looks like the code below:

	<% form_for @project, :url => project_path do |f| -%>
	  <%= f.text_field :title %>
	<% end -%>

Now we are getting an error relating to our stub previously created mock.

	ActionView::TemplateError in '/projects/new.html.erb should have a form'
	undefined method `title' for #<Proc:0x25664e8>

To fix this we modify our mock to look like the snippet below:

	    @project = mock_model(Project,
	                          :title=>'A cool project')

All we have done here is set the title for our project within our mock, fixing our previously broken test.

Now that we have resolved that issue we should be on to our next failing spec.

	'/projects/new.html.erb should have a form' FAILED
	Expected at least 1 element matching "textarea#project_description[name='project[description]']", found 0.
	<false> is not true.

Again this is pretty straight forward, we simply add a text area field to our view, making our view look like below:

	<% form_for @project, :url => project_path do |f| -%>
	  <%= f.text_field :title %>
		<%= f.text_area :description %>
	<% end -%>

Now we stumble upon another issue with our mock, which recieved an unexpected message:

	ActionView::TemplateError in '/projects/new.html.erb should have a form'
	Mock 'Project_1001' received unexpected message :description with (no args)

we could stub out each of our properties as we go along but to be honest that gets very boring very quick.

Lets get this solved once & for all, we’ll modify our mock_model as follows:

	@project = mock_model(Project,
                        :null_object=>true)

This gets us back on track & strolling on to the next expected failure, our missing aims field:

	'/projects/new.html.erb should have a form' FAILED
	Expected at least 1 element matching "textarea#project_aim[name='project[aim]']", found 0.
	 is not true.

Now with our view looking like the example below:

	<% form_for @project, :url => project_path do |f| -%>
	  <%= f.text_field :title %>
		<%= f.text_area :description %>
		<%= f.text_area :aim %>
	<% end -%>

Our specs are now passing but we still have one step missing from our definitions, we left the submit button out of our spec’s but we specified them here luckly enough, let’s get this test passing.

	<% form_for @project, :url => project_path do |f| -%>
	  <%= f.text_field :title %>
		<%= f.text_area :description %>
		<%= f.text_area :aim %>
		<%= f.submit "Create", :disable_with => 'Creating...' %>
	<% end -%>

We have another failing test

	No action responded to create. Actions: authorized?, current_user, logged_in?, and new (ActionController::UnknownAction)

So we basically need to setup a create method in our project controller, we stub out the response for a later scenario.

	def create
    redirect_to projects_path @project
  end

Doing this will create another error, we need to create a project show view, so create that & we are ready to move on to the next step.

Thees last two are nice & easy.

       Then /^the form will not be re-rendered$/ do
	  response.should_not have_selector :form
	end
Then /^I should get confirmation of the successful creation$/ do 	  flash.should contain "You have successfully created your new project" 	end 

Our projects controller looks now looks like the following:

	class ProjectsController & ApplicationController
	  def new
	    @project = Project.new
	  end

	  def create
            @project = Project.new params[:project]
            @project.save
            flash[:notice] = "You have successfully created your new project"
	    redirect_to projects_path @project
	  end
	end

We’ll need to do one more thing to get all our tests passing, we’ll need to create a show action in our controller, we’ll stub it out for now

    def show
        respond_to do |format|
            format.html
        end
    end

All our steps are now passing, lets quickly clean up our view whilst we have our code in a stable passing state, lets sort out our welcome page.

	<%= link_to "Sign up", signup_path %>
	<% if false == self.current_user.nil? %>
	<%= link_to "New Project", new_project_path %>
	<% end -%>

Now along with our specs & our step definitions all passing, we can safely move on to the next story.
We'll leave that for the next post, what I will leave for now is an outline of what we need to cover on the next few iterations.

When submitting the form the user must be alerted if the title is not present
When submitting the form the user must be alerted if the description is not present
When submitting the form the user must be alerted if the aim is not present
When submitting the form the user must be alerted if the project already exists
When submitting the form the user successfully, the project will be save

Jumping on the Rails Pt.3 – Getting Authenticated

Carrying on from my last post, I’ll introduce Rest Authentication to the Story Board project. The plugin comes with its own stories & definitions, so it will be a nice learning source for us whilst learning Cucumber & RSpec

So to start off with lets install the plugin. Now I’ve experienced some issues with Technoweenie’s branch of the code, so I ended up doing some digging and finding a fork by Ombwa, we’ll install this to get our authentication done quickly.

 script/plugin install git://github.com/ombwa/restful-authentication.git

As per the docs you’ll need to do the following if your using Rails 2.1+:

cd vendor/plugins &&

mv restful-authentication restful_authentication &&
cd ../../

Now we need the act as state machine plugin.

script/plugin install http://elitists.textdriven.com/svn/plugins/acts_as_state_machine/trunk

Next we need to create our user & sesion models

./script/generate authenticated user sessions \
			--include-activation \
			--stateful \
			--rspec &&
rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test &&
rake db:fixtures:load RAILS_ENV=test

Now some of the plugins tests fail, so we need to get those passing before we can tick this off the to do list.

Now we need to map our session controller, to do this we need to add the code below to route.rb

 map.session '/session', :controller => 'sessions', :action => 'create'

If we’re using activation we’ll need to add the following to the environment.rb file.

config.active_record.observers = :user_observer

If we have activation set we’ll need to also do the following:

map.activate '/activate/:activation_code',
             :controller => 'users',
             :action => 'activate',
             :activation_code => nil

And finally we added the following to the ApplicationController

include AuthenticatedSystem

Now there are some tests that may fail, namely the routing related user controller specs, you may see something similar to:

 undefined method `formatted_users_path' for #<Spec::Rails::Example::ControllerExampleGroup::Subclass_2::Subclass_3:0x22f8698>

Simply rename this to new_users_path and do the same for the other methods with the methods with ‘formatted’ prefixed:

• formatted_users_path
• formatted_new_users_path

I also had issues with the following user model specs, there are not critical for myself so committed a sin and commented them out. The following where the tests that I had issues with:

• should route users’s ‘update’ action correctly
• should route users’s ‘delete’ action correctly

Next we’ll get a run of errors from out view specs. We’ll quickly create an application layout that will help us pass the rest of the restful-authentication’s plugin tests. Most of these are asserting that we have a div.notice & div.error element, the below fixed those tests for me.

<html>
	<head>
		<title>Story Board</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<div id="notice" class="notice"><%= flash[:notice] %></div>
		<div id="error" class="error"><%= flash[:error] %></div>
		<%= yield :layout %>
	</body>
</html>

One final thing, I came across authentication tests that fail, this is usually due to the records not being reloaded after a creation. Adding the following code to both after_create & after_save calls within the UserObserver class, so that our tokens are correct.

user.reload

Now that all our tests are passing, we’re ready to start delving into the main requirements of the application. The next feature is to allow registered users to create a new project. So well create a new file called registered_users.feature and add the following content.

Feature: As a registered user I must be able to create projects
  In order to create a new project I must be logged in
  As a registered user
  I want I want to be able to create new projects

	Scenario: A registered user must be able to create projects
	  Given I am logged in
	  When I click new project
		And fill in the new project form
	  Then I should get confirmation of the successful creation

We’ll focus on this functionality in part 4 of ‘Jumping on the Rails‘. In the meantime I recommend having a look at the stories and definitions that come packed with Restful Authentication, I’ve found very useful in helping me to improve my own stories and definitions