[rspec-users] Testing render :text without has_text

Mark Wilden mwilden at twistage.com
Thu May 8 18:26:52 EDT 2008

A controller I'm trying to test simply delivers a text string to the  
client, which then demarshalls it to retrieve some objects. I want to  
test that the returned string is correct.

I don't want to compare the string character-by-character with  
response.has_text because that ties me to the implementation of the  
Marshall class. Instead, I just want to demarshall the string and  
compare that with the expected objects. To do this, I need RSpec to  
give me the complete text string that's rendered by the controller.

Here's the controller:

class StatsController < ApplicationController
  layout nil

  def query
    reports = StatisticsReporter.query params[:query_params]
    render :text => Marshal.dump(reports)

And here's the test:

describe StatsController do
   before :each do
      @query_params = { :foo => :bar }

  it "should return a demarshallable string of the reports" do
    reports =  [
      StatisticsReport.new(:date => nil),
      StatisticsReport.new(:bytes_transferred => 0)
    StatisticsReporter.should_receive(:query).and_return reports

    get :query, :query_params => @query_params

     # PROBLEM CODE (the equality test needs tweaking, but you get the  
     Marshal.load(response.what_goes_here?).should == reports

(This code may look familiar to one member of this list...:)

Can this be done?



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