Testing the Notifier class with Rspec
Today, I needed to spec the Notifier (mailer) class in a Rails project.
I don’t mean to spec the view, I just needed to test if the Notifier class method was being called with some params.
For example, I had this user story
As a User
When I am an owner of an issue
And the issue status changes
I want to get an email
So, all I had to to in my spec, is to test if the Notifier class was being called, I am testing the view in the notifier_spec, so no need to test it twice.
So, I wrote this code.
| Notifier.should_receive(:issue_status_change).with(@main_user, Issue.first) |
When I ran the spec, I was surprised to see this error:
| Failures: | |
| 1) Issue Notifications status change should notify users with the bitmask on | |
| Failure/Error: issue.update_attributes(:status => 1) | |
| NoMethodError: | |
| undefined method `deliver' for nil:NilClass | |
| # ./app/models/issue_observer.rb:59:in `block in after_update' | |
| # ./app/models/issue_observer.rb:52:in `after_update' | |
| # ./spec/models/issue_spec.rb:60:in `block (4 levels) in <top (required)>' |
After scratching my head for a while, I realized that since I used mocks and expectations for the Notifier class, the underlying code was never called, so it wasn’t returning the Mail::Message class.
I fixed it by doing this:
| Notifier.should_receive(:issue_status_change).with(@main_user, Issue.first).and_return(double("mailer", | |
| :deliver => true)) |
And now I have a happy spec file, that is only testing the messages between the classes, which is what I wanted to do in the first place.