Echographia

A useful testing method in Rails is assert_select. In a functional test, you can use it to make sure the controller’s response has the HTML you expect:

should "display the suggestion as a link" do
  assert_select 'a[href=?]', @click_url, @display_url
end

… says there should be an <a> tag with the given href attribute and content. Clearer and less brittle than computing a string and searching for it.

But what if you want to assert something about the HTML structure of something that isn’t the controller response? Like, if you want to look for a link in the flash hash?

I just added this to my test_helper.rb:

class ActiveSupport::TestCase
  def assert_select_from(text, *args)
    @selected = HTML::Document.new(text).root.children
    assert_select(*args)
  end
end

Now in my tests I can use the full power of assert_select on an arbitrary string:

should "provide an undo/delete link" do
  assert_select_from(flash[:notice], 'a[href=?]',
    venue_path(assigns(:venue)), 'undo')
end

This weekend RailsBridge ran its first Rails BugMash:

The idea is simple: RailsBridge has a lot of energy. The Rails Lighthouse has a lot of open tickets. With the help of some Rails Core team members, we’re going to see what we can do to cut down the number of open tickets, encourage more people to get involved with the Rails source, and have some fun.

Definitely a success - reportedly at least 120 tickets were closed, I’m sure a lot of new people got involved, and the people on #railsbridge seemed to be having fun.
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