How to test an RSS feed, with cucumber or rspec

Question

Anyone have any tips on how to test an rss feed with cucumber (preference) or rspec?

Note, I am currently working on a Rails 3 application with a blog which I expose as an rss feed.

I would like to set up a test to ensure that it remains well formatted and consumable.

Thanks!

Jonathan

Answer 1

To test an RSS feed with RSpec you can use :format => "rss" in your controller tests, i.e. you can simple use something like this:

describe "GET RSS feed" do
  it "returns an RSS feed" do
    get :index, :format => "rss"
    response.should be_success
    response.should render_template("posts/index")
    response.content_type.should eq("application/rss+xml")
  end
end

Using Test::Unit, you would write

def test_get_rss_feed
  get :index, :format => "rss"
  assert_response :success
  assert_template "posts/index"   
  assert_equal 'application/rss+xml', @response.content_type
end