Been a bit of a dummy in this one. Basically each step definition is a regular expression so if we have

When /^I add (\d+) products to the cart$/ do |n|

we can improve this to make allow both

When I add 1 product to the cart
When I add 2 products to the cart

Had a problem with a feature failing. Was getting an error

When I add a product to the cart                     # features/steps/cart_steps.rb:11
      Cannot redirect to nil! (ActionController::ActionControllerError)
      /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.1.1/lib/action_controller/base.rb:1044:in `redirect_to'

Assert_Select is the main Rails tool for testing HTML output. RSpec wraps this function with its have_tag and with_tag methods. Using these methods effectively is key to writing features. However Assert_Select has some problems which caught me out recently.

Been thinking about specifying paths in stories and steps, and the brittleness they can introduce to tests. This was prompted by a bug in rspecs 'render_template' matcher.

Depressing how long it took me to find out that the visits method in webrat follows all redirects. This means that having a story like

When  I visit /products/1
Then  I should be redirected to the home page

is nonsense as you cannot detect the redirect. In fact all webrats methods follow redirects

Debugging with Cucumber

Simple as putting a debugger statement in any steps file.

Note also that you can run just one feature at a time with cucumber using -l. See cucumber -h

AASM is a/the state machine plugin, which you can now use as a gem. To do this you need to do 2 things

1. Install the GEM
2. Tell your app about AASM

Cucumber is the new runner for Rspec plain text stories. It has a number of improvements that make it essential, and it will soon become the default runner for rspec. To get started we need to do a few things

If you've forgotten something from a commit you can add it to the previous commit using the --amend parameter. This is most useful to keep your GIT repo tidy.