Looking through a tutorial on controller testing the author gives an example of an rspec test testing a controller action. My question is, why did they use the method attributes_for
over build
? There is no clear explanation why attributes_for
is used besides that it returns a hash of values.
it "redirects to the home page upon save" do post :create, contact: Factory.attributes_for(:contact) response.should redirect_to root_url end
The tutorial link is found here: http://everydayrails.com/2012/04/07/testing-series-rspec-controllers.html The example is found at the beginning topic section Controller testing basics
RSpec is a testing tool for Ruby, created for behavior-driven development (BDD). It is the most frequently used testing library for Ruby in production applications. Even though it has a very rich and powerful DSL (domain-specific language), at its core it is a simple tool which you can start using rather quickly.
RSpec is a unit test framework for the Ruby programming language. RSpec is different than traditional xUnit frameworks like JUnit because RSpec is a Behavior driven development tool.
attributes_for
will return a hash, whereas build
will return a non persisted object.
Given the following factory:
FactoryGirl.define do factory :user do name 'John Doe' end end
Here is the result of build
:
FactoryGirl.build :user => #<User id: nil, name: "John Doe", created_at: nil, updated_at: nil>
and the result of attributes_for
FactoryGirl.attributes_for :user => {:name=>"John Doe"}
I find attributes_for
very helpful for my functional test, as I can do things like the following to create a user:
post :create, user: FactoryGirl.attributes_for(:user)
When using build
, we would have to manually create a hash of attributes from the user
instance and pass it to the post
method, such as:
u = FactoryGirl.build :user post :create, user: u.attributes # This is actually different as it includes all the attributes, in that case updated_at & created_at
I usually use build
& create
when I directly want objects and not an attributes hash
Let me know if you need more details
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