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I'm using RSpec 1 and rspec-rails to test my Rails 2.3.14 application. In this same application, I'm using Draper to provide decorators for my models. I want to be able to test my decorators.

I've got specs in spec/decorators, but as best as I can tell, because rspec-rails doesn't recognize the decorators/ path, and therefore doesn't wire up any of the extra Rails stuff into the specs.

How do I set up RSpec to recognize my spec/decorators path, and cause it to include the functionality I need (which is going to be route/helper functionality)?

I notice that RSpec has things like HelperExampleGroup, ControllerExampleGroup, etc, and I suspect that these implicitly map to spec/helpers and spec/controllers and such, but I'm unclear as to how to leverage this to set up my own DecoratorHelperGroup.

I feel like I'm 90% of the way there, but can't quite make that final connection. Examples would be most valuable, but I'll take an abstract, as well.

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1 Answer 1

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Solved it. The magic sauce is Spec::Example::ExampleGroupFactory.register

For the record, here's my complete spec/support/decorators.rb

module Spec
  module Rails
    module Example
      class DecoratorExampleGroupController < ApplicationController
        attr_reader :template

        def view_context

      # spec/decorators
      class DecoratorExampleGroup < FunctionalExampleGroup
        if ActionView::Base.respond_to?(:load_helpers) # Rails 2.0.x
          ActionView::Helpers.constants.each do |name|
            const = ActionView::Helpers.const_get(name)
            include const if name.include?("Helper") && Module === const
        elsif ActionView::Base.respond_to?(:helper_modules) # Rails 2.1.x
          ActionView::Base.helper_modules.each do |helper_module|
            include helper_module
        else # Rails 2.2.x
          include ActionView::Helpers

        tests DecoratorExampleGroupController

        class << self
          def decorate(options = {})
            self.subject { described_class.new(yield, options) }

        before :each do
          @controller.template.request = @request

        Spec::Example::ExampleGroupFactory.register(:decorator, self)

        def _assigns_hash_proxy
          @_assigns_hash_proxy ||= AssignsHashProxy.new(self) {@response.template}

All this effectively does is register specs under spec/decorators to operate as view specs (which gets me all the pieces I need). Before each decorator spec, calling #set_current_view_context on the controller invokes the Draper bits necessary to wire helpers up into my decorators. I also added a decorate method to use the current described decorator class to decorate an arbitrary object, allowing easy decoration of objects for testing. Mission accomplished!

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kudos for getting this to work –  zetetic Feb 29 '12 at 3:42

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