⚠️ No Longer Supported

I haven't needed to use this library in a long time and I'm no longer maintaining it to keep it up-to-date with the ruby community. I'm keeping it here as an archive for future reference.

RspecRabl

A collection of convenient helpers for writing view specs with rabl templates.

Update Notes

If you were previously using the rspec_rabl gem please note that you will need to fix a few things in order to upgrade to the latest version:

change your Gemfile to require rspec-rabl (a hyphen instead of an underscore see #8 for more details)
in spec_helper.rb you need to require rspec/rabl instead of rspec_rabl
if you are using rails and you want the default configuration you will need to require rspec/rabl/rails instead of rspec/rails_rabl

Usage

First make sure you configure rspec-rabl in your spec_helper.rb file (see Configuration below).

Now your templates can be rendered with whatever data you like for testing:

describe "budgets/show/rabl" do                            # this tells us what template you want to test
  let(:budget) { Budget.new }
  rabl_data(:root => 'budget') { budget }                  # this tells us what data to use when rendering and what structure you expect the template to have (use root and object_root just like rabl)

  it "renders valid json" do
    expect {
      JSON.parse(rendered_template)                        # rendered_template is the rendered string
    }.not_to raise_error
  end

  it "renders the data in some specific way" do
    expect(parsed_json['budget']['date']).to eq("1984")    # parsed_json is the parsed out version of the rendered string
  end
end

But most of the time you want to check some pretty common things like:

describe "budgets/show.rabl" do
  let(:budget) { Budget.new }
  rabl_data(:root => 'budget') { budget }

  it { expect(subject).to render_attribute(:amount) }                        # parsed_json['budget']['amount'] == budget.amount
  it { expect(subject).to render_attribute(:amount).with(:friendly_amount) } # parsed_json['budget']['amount'] == budget.friendly_amount
  it { expect(subject).to render_attribute(:amount).with_value("45.00") }    # parsed_json['budget']['amount'] == "45.00"
end

describe "budgets/index.rabl" do
  let(:budgets) { [ Budget.new ] }
  rabl_data(:root => 'budgets', :object_root => 'budget') { budgets }

  it { expect(subject).to render_attribute(:amount) }                       # parsed_json['budgets'].first['budget']['amount'] == budgets.first.amount
end

If you don't want to specify the template you are testing via the describe/context string you can specify the template like this:

describe "Users are rendered with the humorous attribute" do
  rabl_template { "users/show.rabl" }
  rabl_data(:root => 'user') { user }

  specify { expect(subject).to render_attribute(:humorous).with_value("not really") }
end

Configuration

The easiest way to configure this is simple

require 'rspec/rabl/rails'

For more detailed configuration just look at that file to see what configurations it is making.

Additionally, there are two config attributes which can be specified using rabl_config:

scope is the rendering context which is passed to create the underlying Rabl::Renderer instance for an example group. If your rabl template is using, for example, view helpers in Rails but your spec is raising a NoMethodError, then you probably want to pass in a scope which includes that helper.

describe "Users which use a Helper to transform data for presentation" do
  class ScopeWithUsersHelper
    include Singleton
    include UsersHelper # could have a method which formats an email address for use below
  end

  rabl_config(:scope => ScopeWithUsersHelper.instance)
  rabl_template { "users/show.rabl" }
  rabl_data(:root => 'user') { user }

  specify { expect(subject).to render_attribute(:formatted_email).with_value('"Kung Fury" <thechosenone@example.com>') }
end

view_paths instructs the Rabl::Renderer where to look for its rabl templates for the purpose of an example group.

Contributing

Fork it
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create new Pull Request

rspec-rabl