Help tracing why controller spec is failing

Question

I have a user_controller_spec.rb that is failing, and I'm not sure why.

require 'spec_helper'

describe UsersController do

  describe "GET 'index'" do
    it "should be successful" do
      get 'index'
      response.should be_success
    end
  end


end

When I run rspec it says:

Failures:

  1) UsersController GET 'index' should be successful
     Failure/Error: response.should be_success
       expected success? to return true, got false
     # ./spec/controllers/users_controller_spec.rb:8

Finished in 0.17047 seconds
1 example, 1 failure

Going to the /home/ page in the browser works fine.

Is there a way to get a more detailed reason why it is failing?

Note:

This is rails3, and I am using rspec.

I also have the capybara gem, and searching my solution shows the only reference to capybara is in my gem and gem.lock file.

Answer 1

You can try outputting the response body to see what the message is. Could be anything from the user you're logged in as not having the correct permissions (or visiting a page anonymously that you must be logged in to see) to a strange view error in test environment.

get 'index'
puts response.body.inspect
puts response.status.inspect
...
response.should be_success

response.body will contain the HTML output of the response, so you should be able to tell why it's not a success (hopefully it will have a stack trace or be a redirect or something). Also keep in mind redirecting is not "success". If I remember correctly be_success makes sure the HTTP status code is one of the 200s, redirects are usually 302 or 304 so do not count. If a redirect is intended, try response.should be_redirect.

Answer 2

It could be that you do not just render the page, but redirect. To check on what may be wrong, i would do in my spec something like :

response.should == 1

in order to see what the actual response is. This would give you a good clue on what is happening.