Rails: "missing partial" when calling 'render' in RSpec test

Question

I'm trying to test for the presence of a form. I'm new to Rails.

My new.html.erb_spec.rb file's contents are:

require 'spec_helper'

describe "messages/new.html.erb" do
  it "should render the form" do
    render '/messages/new.html.erb'
    reponse.should have_form_putting_to(@message) 
    with_submit_button
  end
end

The view itself, new.html.erb, has the code:

<%= form_for(@message) do |f| %>
  <%= f.label :msg %> <br />
  <%= f.text_area :msg %>
  <%= f.submit "Submit" %>
<% end %>

When I run rspec, it fails as so:

1) messages/new.html.erb should render the form

 Failure/Error: render '/messages/new.html.erb'

   Missing partial /messages/new.html with {:handlers=>[:erb, :rjs,:builder,:rhtml, :rxml], :formats=>[:html,:text, :js, :css, :ics, :csv, :xml, :rss, :atom, :yaml, :multipart_form, :url_encoded_form, :json], :locale=>[:en, :en]} in view paths "/Users/tristanmartin/whisperme/app/views"

   # ./spec/views/messages/new.html.erb_spec.rb:5:in `block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'

Does anyone know what the problem is?

Thanks!

Answer 1

don't give any argument to 'render'. try the following

require 'spec_helper'

describe "messages/new.html.erb" do
  it "should render the form" do
    render
    rendered.should contain('blablabla') 
  end
end

Answer 2

I experienced the same issue and I'll describe what I did to solve this, in case you haven't found the solution yet. I think the problem is rspec reports an misleading error here. The real error is something else.

I found this out by first changing the line to:

render :template => "messages/new.html.erb"

This allowed the actual error to surface. In my case, I was not setting up required variable(s), which I corrected.

Once you have set the assigns correctly, spec ran properly.

Then you may go back to either:

render "messages/new.html.erb"

or even just

render

both will work. Missing template issue should be disappeared. At least it did for me. :)

Answer 3

I ran into a similar issue, and was surprised to learn that Rspec does some impressive inference from the describe argument. For example:

require 'spec_helper'

describe "bills/payments/edit.html.erb" do
  it "Renders payment form" do
    assign(:payment, stub_model(Payment))
    render
  end
end

Due to some evolutionary controller / view names, this test originally had:

describe "bills/payment/edit.html.erb" do

that really messed everything up, and even if I set the :template after render, it was unable to find a referenced partial. Fixing up the path in the describe statement fixed it all.