rspec: Stub a template's helper method call from a controller spec using render_views

Question

From Rails 3 / Rspec 2, I'm attempting to leverage the render_views feature of controller specs. The issue I've come across is that we've just installed the kaminari pager gem, and I want to stub out the <%= paginate @sites %> call from my view so I don't have to manually stub out all the internal methods that kaminari defines on the collection for use with paginate helper.

If this was in a view spec, I could stub out the helper method by calling view.stub(:paginate), but I can't find any way to get a handle on the view object from a controller spec (e.g. controller.view.stub(:paginate)). Is there any way to do this, or are our options to either disable render_views for this method, or to stub a bunch of internal kaminari methods that aren't relevant to us (since they should be covered by kaminari's tests, and might change in future versions)?

describe SitesController do
  render_views

  def mock_site(stubs={})
    @mock_site ||= mock_model(Site, stubs).as_null_object
  end

  describe "GET index" do
    it "assigns all sites as @sites" do
      Site.stub_chain("enabled.ordered.page") {[mock_site]}
      # want to do something here like: controller.view.stub(:paginate)
      get :index
      assigns(:sites).should eq([mock_site])
    end
  end
end

Answer 1

Either I couldn't find a proper solution.

Probably you may want to investigate controller.view_context a little bit more.

What I settled with (for now) is a monkey patch in rspec/support/kaminari.rb:

module Kaminari::ActionViewExtension::InstanceMethods
  def paginate(scope, options = {}, &block)
    puts "Should test pagination"
  end
end

So it silently fails pagination.