In the last few weeks I've been working on a Rails 3 application for a client. The test suite doesn't cover the whole application, so along with features being added for the client, I've been gradually expanding the test suite to cover the entire application.
The test suite itself uses Minitest and the test syntax. So far I've had an enjoyable experience in adding tests for each part of the application. This week though I faced an issue of duplication in my tests. The application includes a number of mailers. Each mailer has an erb and plain text template. In my first pass at testing this mailer I had some duplication going on with the different templates for each mailer.
assert_match(/Hi there #{person.first_name}/, mail.text_part.to_s)
assert_match(/Hi there #{person.first_name}/, mail.html_part.to_s)
This is just one of many lines in the tests that assert that the two mailer types include the right content. Wouldn't it be nice to wrap these two assertions into one?
Minitest allows you to define your own assertions but up until this time I made do with Minitest and Rails' own assertions. Turns out that adding your own assertions to Minitest is easily done. I included the following assertion in my test_helper file but you can include your own assertions in a seperate file if you want to and then include that in your test_helper file using require.
module Minitest::Assertions
def assert_mail_match(expected, actual)
["text","html"].each do |mail_part|
assert_match(expected, actual.send("#{mail_part}_part").to_s)
end
end
end
What we're doing is adding a wrapper around Mintest's assert_match method and pass in our expected value and the actual value. The method will iterate over the two mail parts in the mailer and assert that each format has the correct corresponding content.
We can now call the new assertion in our tests:
assert_mail_match(/Hi there #{person.first_name}/, mail)
Wrapping these two assertions into one makes sense. The template formats for the mailers is unlikely to change and the two different formats have the same content albeit with different formatting.
After a couple of years of using RSpec, Minitest has been a nice change to how I test the Rails applications I'm working on. Its syntax and single way of doing things means that I find it easier to write tests. Hopefully, I'll be able to share more insights into using Minitest in the future.
