Rspec model spec

Question

How do i cover the below method using Rspec?

def validate
  if !self.response.blank? && !self.response.match("<").nil?
    self.errors.add :base, 'Please ensure that Response field do not contain HTML(< and >) tags'
  end
end

Can anybody help?

Answer 1

It appears from the code that what you want is to validate the response attribute and set an error message if invalid.

So assuming your model is named Post:

context "HTML tags in response" do
  before(:each) do
    @post = Post.new(:response => "<")
  end

  it "should not be valid" do
    @post.should_not be_valid
  end

  it "should set the error hash" do
    @post.errors.should include('Please ensure that Response field do not contain HTML(< and >) tags')
  end 
end 

You should check for the desired behavior of the model, not the implementation. It shouldn't matter whether the validation is happening in a custom method, or in Rails built-in validation routines.

As a side note, it's generally better to add the error message to the attribute rather than errors.base. So you might say instead:

self.errors.add(:response, "etc. etc.")