Simple Chatter

After we started writing view specs we came across views similar to this:

<p>Stuff in the main content area</p>

<% content_for "secondary_content" do %>
  <p>Stuff that will go in an side panel in the view </p>
<% end %>

Obviously when rendering the view inside the spec, only the blurb about main content area will be in the response.body. For instance the second spec written will fail:

describe "/path/to/view" do
  def do_render
    render "/path/to/view"
  end

  it "should have blurb about main content" do
    do_render
    response.should have_text(/main content/i)
  end

  ##
  # This won't pass.
  ##
  it "should have blub about side panel" do
    do_render
    response.should have_text(/side panel/i)
  end
end

However, you can shove something in your spec_helpers.rb to test items inside the content_for blocks.

def content_for(section)
  template.send(:instance_variable_get, "@content_for_#{section}") || ""
end

And rewrite your spec like this:

describe "/path/to/view" do
  def do_render
    render "/path/to/view"
  end

  it "should have blurb about main content" do
    do_render
    response.should have_text(/main content/i)
  end

  ##
  # This will now pass
  ##
  it "should have blub about side panel" do
    do_render
    content_for("secondary_content").should match(/side panel/i)
  end
end

The have_text() matcher won't work, but you can use the have_tag().

If you haven't toyed with content_for, I suggest looking into it. It will help clean and organize your views and layout(s).