I am working on some Cucumber stories for a 'sign up' application which has a number of steps.
Rather then writing a Huuuuuuuge story to cover all the steps at once, which would be bad, I'd rather work through each action in the controller like a regular user. My problem here is that I am storing the account ID which is created in the first step as a session variable, so when step 2, step 3 etc are visited the existing registration data is loaded.
I'm aware of being able to access controller.session[..]
within RSpec specifications however when I try to do this in Cucumber stories it fails with the following error (and, I've also read somewhere this is an anti-pattern etc...):
Using controller.session[:whatever] or session[:whatever]
You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
The error occurred while evaluating nil.session (NoMethodError)
Using session(:whatever)
wrong number of arguments (1 for 0) (ArgumentError)
So, it seems accession the session store isn't really possible. What I'm wondering is if it might be possible to (and I guess which would be best..):
- Mock out the session store etc
- Have a method within the controller and stub that out (e.g.
get_registration
which assigns an instance variable...)
I've looked through the RSpec book (well, skimmed) and had a look through WebRat etc, but I haven't really found an answer to my problem...
To clarify a bit more, the signup process is more like a state machine - e.g. the user progresses through four steps before the registration is complete - hence 'logging in' isn't really an option (it breaks the model of how the site works)...
In my spec for the controller I was able to stub out the call to the method which loads the model based on the session var - but I'm not sure if the 'antipattern' line also applies to stubs as well as mocks?
Thanks!
After a lot of soul searching and web surfing, I finally opt'ed for a very simple and obvious solution.
Using cookies adds two problems. First you have code in the application specific for testing and second there is the problem that creating cookies in Cucumber is hard when using anything other than rack test. There are various solutions to the cookie problem but all of them are a bit challenging, some introduce mocks, and all of them are what I call 'tricky'. One such solution is here.
My solution is the following. This is using HTTP basic authentication but it could be generalized for most anything.
test_authenticate does what ever the normal authenticate does except it bypasses any time consuming parts. In my case, the real authentication is using LDAP which I wanted to avoid.
Yes… it is a bit gross but it is clear, simple, and obvious. And… no other solution I've seen is cleaner or clearer.
Note, one feature is that if the user_name is not 'testuser', then the normal path is taken so they can be tested.
Hope this helps others...
I'll repeat danpickett in saying mocks should be avoided whenever possible in Cucumber. However if your app does not have a login page, or perhaps performance is a problem, then it may be necessary to simulate login directly.
This is an ugly hack, but it should get the job done.
mocks are bad in cucumber scenarios - they're almost kind of an antipattern.
My suggestion is to write a step that actually logs a user in. I do it this way
I realize that the instance variable
@user
is kind of bad form—but I think in the case of logging in/out, having@user
is definitely helpful.Sometimes I call it
@current_user
.I don't know how much this relates to the original question anymore, but I decided to post anyway in the spirit of discussion...
We have a cucumber test suite that takes > 10 minutes to run so we wanted to do some optimization. In our app the login process triggers a LOT of extra functionality that is irrelevant to majority of the scenarios, so we wanted to skip that by setting the session user id directly.
Ryanb's approach above worked nicely, except that we were unable to log out using that approach. This made our multi-user stories fail.
We ended up creating a "quick login" route that is only enabled in test environment:
Here is the corresponding action that creates the session variable:
For us this ended up being simpler than working with the cookies array. As a bonus, this approach also works with Selenium/Watir.
Downside is that we're including test-related code in our application. Personally I don't think that adding code to make application more testable is a huge sin, even if it does add a bit of clutter. Perhaps the biggest problem is that future test authors need to figure out which type of login they should use. With unlimited hardware performance we obviously wouldn't be doing any of this.
Re. Ryan's solution - you can open up ActionController in you env.rb file and place it there to avoid putting in your production code base (thanks to john @ pivotal labs)