How to Test a Concern in Rails

Question

The method you found will certainly work to test a little bit of functionality but seems pretty fragile—your dummy class (actually just a Struct in your solution) may or may not behave like a real class that includes your concern. Additionally if you're trying to test model concerns, you won't be able to do things like test the validity of objects or invoke ActiveRecord callbacks unless you set up the database accordingly (because your dummy class won't have a database table backing it). Moreover, you'll want to not only test the concern but also test the concern's behavior inside your model specs.

So why not kill two birds with one stone? By using RSpec's shared example groups, you can test your concerns against the actual classes that use them (e.g., models) and you'll be able to test them everywhere they're used. And you only have to write the tests once and then just include them in any model spec that uses your concern. In your case, this might look something like this:

# app/models/concerns/personable.rb
module Personable
  extend ActiveSupport::Concern

  def full_name
    "#{first_name} #{last_name}"
  end
end

# spec/concerns/personable_spec.rb
require 'spec_helper'

shared_examples_for "personable" do
  let(:model) { described_class } # the class that includes the concern

  it "has a full name" do
    person = FactoryBot.build(model.to_s.underscore.to_sym, first_name: "Stewart", last_name: "Home")
    expect(person.full_name).to eq("Stewart Home")
  end
end

# spec/models/master_spec.rb
require 'spec_helper'
require Rails.root.join "spec/concerns/personable_spec.rb"

describe Master do
  it_behaves_like "personable"
end

# spec/models/apprentice_spec.rb
require 'spec_helper'

describe Apprentice do
  it_behaves_like "personable"
end

The advantages of this approach become even more obvious when you start doing things in your concern like invoking AR callbacks, where anything less than an AR object just won't do.

In response to the comments I've received, here's what I've ended up doing (if anyone has improvements please feel free to post them):

spec/concerns/personable_spec.rb

require 'spec_helper'

describe Personable do
  let(:test_class) { Struct.new(:first_name, :last_name) { include Personable } }
  let(:personable) { test_class.new("Stewart", "Home") }

  it "has a full_name" do
    expect(personable.full_name).to eq("#{personable.first_name} #{personable.last_name}")
  end
end

Another thought is to use the with_model gem to test things like this. I was looking to test a concern myself and had seen the pg_search gem doing this. It seems a lot better than testing on individual models, since those might change, and it's nice to define the things you're going to need in your spec.