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Ruby Build a Todo List Application with Rails 4 Build a Todo List Application with Rails 4 Write Our First Tests

Rachelle Wood
Rachelle Wood
15,362 Points
Posted by Rachelle Wood
Rachelle Wood
15,362 Points

I just don't get this

Hi all,

I have a mystery to solve. I have been banging my head over this for the past hour. I can't get the create_spec.rb to work with the code shown in the video. I am using rspec 2.99.

When I ran the first two tests, I kept getting failures. Rspec told me that it did not recognize the methods. After some trial and error, I realized that it was the expect(page).to have_content("stuff") statements in the code that were causing the problem. I had to replace them with page.has_content?("stuff") instead. Then it worked fine.

The last test passed with expect(TodoList.count).to eq(0).

It looks like Rspec 2.99 supports expect.to blah blah, so what gives? I would like this to work with something that ressembles the code that the instructor gave in the video since it seems like the page.has_content? method is going to become deprecated at some point?

4 Answers

Seth Reece
Seth Reece
32,867 Points
Seth Reece
Seth Reece
32,867 Points

Ahh, you need a capital L on List in your test. you are expecting the page to have content "New Todo list" but your test is finding "New Todo List".

Seth Reece
Seth Reece
32,867 Points
Seth Reece
Seth Reece
32,867 Points

Hi Rachelle,

expect(page).to have_content 'stuff'

is the current capybara syntax in the docs.

expect(page).to have_content('stuff')

should still work though.

page.has_content?('stuff')

is syntax for the gem cucumber. Are you are using

assert page.has_content?('stuff')

If not you might be getting a false pass. What are the no method errors you are getting? You might have an undefined method, or a method that is not being set properly and returning nil.

Rachelle Wood
Rachelle Wood
15,362 Points
Rachelle Wood
Rachelle Wood
15,362 Points

Hi. Thanks for your answer. I looked in my Gemfile but I don't see the cucumber gem in it. I also did not add assert to my statements.

I tried expect(page).to have_content 'stuff' as well and got the same error. I even tried it with "" instead of single quotes.

I tried it again by just changing the first test to have what was originally in the instructor's code and the error message changed (2 examples, 1 failure):

Failures:

  1) Creating todo lists redirects to the todo list index page on success
     Failure/Error: expect(page).to have_content 'New Todo list'
       expected to find text "New Todo list" in "New Todo List Title Description Back"
     # ./spec/features/todo_lists/create_spec.rb:7:in `block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'
Rachelle Wood
Rachelle Wood
15,362 Points
Rachelle Wood
Rachelle Wood
15,362 Points

Oh wow! That is what it was! Thank you for suggesting that. Oddly, on the webpage it was "New Todo list" not "New Todo List", which is why I had it like that in the code. This works now!