rspec testing association

Question

I want to test that a staff member is associated with a company in my rspec controller tests.

I would like to end up with this in my create action of the staff controller:

staff.companies << current_company

Where current_company is collected from a session variable.

How do I write a test for this?

I've got these models

class Company < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :employees
  has_many :staff, :through => :employees
end

class Employee < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :company
  belongs_to :staff
end

class Staff < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :employees
  has_many :companies, :through => :employees
end

The following test is my attempt to spec the assocation and it fails when I enter in the association code:

    it "should belong to the current_company" do
      staff.should_receive(:companies)
      post :create
    end

If I enter the 'staff.companies << current_company' code in my controller I get this error when running that test:

 Failure/Error: post :create
 NoMethodError:
   You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
   You might have expected an instance of Array.
   The error occurred while evaluating nil.<<

Staff controller create method:

  def create
    @staff = Staff.new(params[:staff])

    if @staff.save
      @staff.companies << current_company
      redirect_to staff_index_path, :notice => "Staff created successfully!"
    else
      @company = @staff.firm || current_company
      flash[:alert] = "Staff failed to create"
      render "new"
    end
  end

Answer 1

I would use a different approach, since testing that the model should receive a certain message couples your tests too tightly to the implementation. Do you really care whether companies receives #<< or some other method?

Really, what you want to test is whether the user's company is recorded when they post to the page. It doesn't matter how it was recorded. So I'd do something like this:

it "should add the company to the user's list of companies" do
  lambda do 
    post :create
  end.should change(staff.companies, :count).from(0).to(1)
  staff.companies.map(&:name).should include("Acme, Inc.")
end

This is testing behavior instead of implementation. The advantage is that your test wont fail when someone changes that << to the equivalent push. It also has the advantage of being clearer about your intention and therefore better documenting the code.

Answer 2

If you're in your controller spec, I would use stub_chain

staff.stub_chain(:company, :<<).once.and_return(true)

which will mock out the company call AND the << call AND expect it to be called once.

(At least, that .once should work with stub_chain...)