Salad, adding cucumber

Well I was hoping to get this post published a month or so ago but better late than never.

As some of you may know, I’ve taken some time to learn Ruby & Rails over the past few months and have been using RSpec & Cucumber quite a bit to roll out new functionality.

It soon came to my attention that though Cucumber is a wonderful tool it would be nice to be able to manage scenarios and stories a lot easier and give stack holders a front-end to which they can get a view of what features are to be implemented and how what steps are required to complete a story.

This is where Salad was born, inspired by my latest blog series ‘Jumping on the Rails‘ I decided to make a small rails app that allows users to import and create features for a specific project.

My aim is to integrate the functionality of cucumber along with the other major project management tool (BaseCamp, LightHouse, etc) giving stakeholders and developers alike an easy way to manage, prioritise and understand the stories needed to complete a given scenario.

Functionality

• Create project features
• Upload project features
• Manage features, stories & steps
• Link stories to a project
• Link steps to a story

Future Features

• Sychronise feature, stories & steps
• Link a feature to a milestone
• Estimate feature implementation

Over the next few weeks I’ll hopefully have time to improve the general layout of the application, making it more visually pleasing but for the moment it has all the basic functionality necessary to manage your projects new & present features.

Salad can be found here and is easy to install, as outlined below.

Installation

1. Download from here.
2. cd to the applications directory
3. Run script/server
4. Point your browser to http://localhost:3000/projects
5. Enjoy

Comments and contributions are more than welcome, my main goal is to provide a simple application that can help bridge the gap between stakeholders and developers.

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 😉

Jumping on the Rails Pt.2 – RSpec, Cucumber & Webrat

Well it’s been a while since I’ve written anything really technical & seeing as Rails is taking up a lot of my personal time, I thought I made sense to put some of my newly found knowledge together.

I thought it best to not go over material that has already been done and very well I might add, I’ll just focus on the things have have interested me most & how to take advantage of them in real world situations. This and the next few posts will focus on developing and application using Cucumber, Rails & Webrat to drive the development process. Before I go on, I’d say that none of this would be possible if not for The RSpec book, I’ve read it for a couple times whilst the beta has been floating about and recommend the book to everyone developing in Rails, if only to see what it has to offer.

Lets start of with a basic application. StoryBoard, allows users to create & manage projects and their features with a focus on capturing features that can be used with Cucumber.


rails PROJECTNAME
cd PROJECTNAME

Now we need to setup our BDD environment

script/plugin install --force git://github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber.git &&
script/plugin install --force git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec.git &&
script/plugin install --force git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec-rails.git &&
script/plugin install --force git://github.com/brynary/webrat.git &&
script/generate rspec &&
script/generate cucumber

Now that’s all we really need to setup our BDD environment, let start with a basic feature to get our feet wet:

Feature: Users must be able to register to the site

In order to allow new users to join the site they need to be able to view the home page & register.
As a guest user
I want to be able to register to the site so that I can create new scenarios for a project

Scenario: A user must be able to view the welcome page
Given I am not logged in
When I visit the home page
Then I should see the sign up link

Seems reasonable, users should be able to view the home page and see a sign up link, after all no one can register without one.

Now a nice little gift that comes with our plugins is autospec, I added the following to my .bash_profile

export AUTOFEATURE=true


This allows me to test both my specs & step definitions.

Starting script/autospec allows us to run our tests automatically on ever save, which can be a nice time saver for those who forget to test after a change.

You can implement step definitions for undefined steps with these snippets:
1 scenario (1 undefined)

3 steps (2 undefined, 1 passed)
0m0.050s

You can implement step definitions for undefined steps with these snippets:

Given /^I am not logged in$/ do
pending
end

When /^I visit the home page$/ do
pending
end

Then /^I should see the sign up link$/ do
pending
end

Cucumber is nice enough to give us code snippets to use in our step definitions, lets start with the first.

Create the file registration_steps.rb

We’ll cheat here seeing as we don’t need to set anything up, it passes.

Given /^I am not logged in$/ do
end


That gets our first part, lets move on to the next, again cucumber will nicely give us the next step definition, we’ll modifiy to look like the code below.

To take advantage of webrat within our specs we’ll need to add the following to our spec_helper.rb

require 'webrat'
config.include Webrat::Matchers, :type => :views


It should now look something like this:

ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= 'test'
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../config/environment" unless defined?(RAILS_ROOT)
require 'spec/autorun'
require 'spec/rails'
require 'webrat'

Dir["#{File.dirname(__FILE__)}/support/**/*.rb"].each {|f| require f}

Spec::Runner.configure do |config|
config.use_transactional_fixtures = true
config.use_instantiated_fixtures  = false
config.fixture_path = RAILS_ROOT + '/spec/fixtures/'
config.include Webrat::Matchers, :type => :views
end

Now for the next step definition

When /^I visit the home page$/ do
visit '/'
end


Ok, we obviously need to setup a route for this one.

map.root :controller => "welcome"


We get another error saying:

uninitialized constant WelcomeController (NameError)


Okay we know we don’t have a controller, how about we cheat and make one just to make things pass for now. Especially as we don’t want to get bogged down with detail.

script/generate rspec_controller Welcome index


That will basically create our welcome page for us. We can now move on to the next step definition.

Then /^I should see the sign up link$/ do
response.should contain 'Sign up'
end


Now our tests are back to failing again, we’ll move to the controllers view to iron out our functionality.

Own spec_controller was nice enough to create our view for us, lets open up the view spec and add a spec.


#Delete this example and add some real ones or delete this file
it "should tell you where to find the file" do
response.should have_tag('p', %r[Find me in app/views/welcome/index])
end


Is our first test in our view spec, lets replace this with something more meaningful.


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


Here we just want to make sure that we have a page where we can sign the user up. Let get it to pass, remove the index.html from the public directory, the add the code below to your Welcome controllers index view.

<a href="/signup">Sign up</a>


Nice and simple, right. Now we’re still got alot of work to do but that is what the other stories are for ;), we’ll follow up with those in the next post.

Jumping on the Rails

Well on my journey to improve my programming skills & again purely because I’ve been getting tired of using PHP for all my solutions, I recently decided to delve into Rails.

I’d been pointed to it by Ekerete Akpan an old work collegue who uses it quite extensively with his own projects.

I’d resisted from learning the language initially primarily down to the fact that the language seemed to be quite basic, in that I was correct, something I’m regretting as I find it now to be one of the best features.

I initally wanted to create a frontend for Chatterl, using ActiveResource. After fighting with it for a week or so, I ended up scrapping that notion and moving on to another project idea I had kept aside for a little while (Solvius).

I won’t go into detail on the goals of Solvius as the site is already live & a brief summary of the webapp can be found here.

The first thing I did was get my self a copy of The Rails way, I have to say I’ve not used the book much over the past month but it was indepensible when it came to helping me learn the basics. I had also picked up copies of ‘Agile Web Development with Rails‘ & ‘Rails for PHP Developers‘, though these proved to be little help & ended up being frustrating reads as they both presumed the reader had basic knowledge of programming methodologies.

By this time I had built the basic functionality of Solvius, allowing users to join the site and create and solve problems, using the active as authenticated plugin. My journey was far from over, I wanted to add ReCaptcha & a little JQuery to the mix. I got a little excited thinking that I could get my hands dirty but low and behold there were plugins for both of these features also :D. Such things are a rarity in the PHP world and having spent a great deal of time there, the PHP side of me felt robbed, whilst the code monkey in me was pleased that I could deal with more direct problems.

All though my inital experience was a pleasant one, I wanted to improve on it further. I’ve been using TDD for a while and played around with Test::Unit for a bit but wasn’t really happy using it, I decided to go for my next book purchase ‘The RSpec Book‘. I have to say reading that was an eye opener, not only from a BDD newbie stand point but also from a coders point of  view, the book helped to improve my coding style and gave me a few cool ideas to play around with when I get the chance.

I started introducing RSpec & cucumber into Solvius about a week ago & already started to reap the benefits, primarily being able to implement functionality from a users point of view rather than my techie one, along with having a point of reference and an enhanced sense of confidence in implementing new functionality.

I’ve read ‘The RSpec Book‘ a couple of times now and will hopefully get the chance to use Cucumber & RSpec in my next pet project. For the moment though I’ll focus my time on improving Solvius & improving my Rails skills in general. Although it feels as if I have picked up the framework pretty quickly, there is still a host of things to grasp & learn.

I’m hoping I’ll have enough time to create a serious of posts, outlining the whole development process using Rails & the tools I’ve picked up over the course of my Rails journey.

Latest project – Solvius

Well it’s been a while since I’ve written a post, mainly due to the amount of time I’ve spent learning Rails & working on Solvius.

After reading “Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware“, I decided to create a program to store all the problems I come across over times, storing them in a solutions log of sorts. For one reason or another I had put it off.

Fortunately I came up with some free time & decided to finally write the application in Rails, I’m new to Rails & as some of you may know I rarely miss the chance to kill two birds with one stone.

It didn’t take long to create the basic functionality, two weeks at the most, the last few weeks I’ve spent learning Cucumber & RSpec, but thats another post. I’ve finally uploaded the application to my host & setup some basic data, over the next few weeks I’ll incrementally add new functionality to the site.

It’s been an enjoyable experience, I must say I’ve become a total convert to rails (i’ll leave that for another post) & have picked up a crap load of knowledge over the past month of a half learning. Hopefully in the coming weeks I’ll write up my notes and experiences but for now I thought I’d quickly go through what Solvius allows people to do & some of the plans I have for it in the future.

Why

Well as I previously mentioned Solvius was inspired by “Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware“. It’s primary goal is to help people track and store problems & solutions that we come across in our day to day lives. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve come across a problem that I’ve solved but know I’ll have to go digging for the solution.

The cool thing about solvius is that the application can be used to store all kinds of problems and solutions, whether it be some kind of novelty puzzle to some a professional or academic conundrum.

At the moment the application is in beta, so invites are needed before you can signup, hopefully once all the kinks are ironed out and I have the time to improve the design, the site will be open to all.

Features

• Create problems
  Allows a user to create a public or private problem
• Solve problems
  Registered users are able to solve public problems, as well as their private ones
• Make problems private
  Not everyone likes their problems out in the open

Future Features

• Invites via twitter
  Will be able to tweet @solvius which will mail out an invite
• Suggest solutions
  Users are able to suggest solutions for public problems
• Solution & problem search
  Registered users will be able to search for specific types of problems & solutions
• Facebook Connect
  Peoples will be able to register via FBConnect
• Tweet updates
  Updates when problems are solved
• Problem/Solution groups
  Users will be able to join specific problem/solution groups to help in mass problem solving.

Feel free to check out the site out  or tweet @solvius with any suggestions or ideas.