Re: unit testing advice

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 7:04 PM, David A. Black <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Hi --
>
> On Thu, 11 Sep 2008, David Chelimsky wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 6:24 PM, David A. Black <[e-mail]>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi --
>>>
>>> On Thu, 14 Aug 2008, David Chelimsky wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 7:20 AM, David A. Black <[e-mail]>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> The model generation just gives you a file with an empty class
>>>>> definition
>>>>> for
>>>>> your tests, and I think something similar happens with RSpec. (Just to
>>>>> clarify: I'm talking about model generation, not scaffold generation,
>>>>> which does give you all sorts of tests and which I dislike strongly
>>>>> and consider manifestly counter-productive.)
>>>>
>>>> Hi David - I'm curious to know more about why you find this
>>>> counter-productive, if you wouldn't mind sharing.
>>>
>>> Sorry -- I didn't spot this among the unread for some reason.
>>>
>>> I don't want to go into depth since we're not in a Rails forum, but in
>>> brief, it's my experience that the scaffolding neither provides a good
>>> starting point for a production application (which I don't believe it
>>> was ever intended to), nor serves as a good learning tool (which I
>>> believe it is supposed to be). It's a one-trick pony, and there's much
>>> too much of a history of people getting confused or stymied because
>>> they assume that what the scaffolding does is somehow a "default" or
>>> authoritative application skeleton.
>>
>> Hey David,
>>
>> Thanks for the response. And here's my late response to yours for much
>> the same reason...
>>
>> I understood your previous comment to mean you found the code examples
>> generated by rspec to be counter productive, but now I'm sensing its
>> actually the scaffolding.
>
> Yes, I meant the scaffolding.
>
>> Forgetting about rspec or rails, my take is that generated code is
>> just like your own code as far as the ruby runtime is concerned, and
>> that *if* you are using generated code and maintaining it, that it
>> should be accompanied by a robust set of generated tests.
>>
>> Agree? Disagree?
>
> It's an interesting question. I'm trying to puzzle through whether
> there might ever be a case where you'd be generating code but
> generating the tests for it was for some reason prohibitively more
> difficult. I think that if not then it makes sense to generate tests.
> Or do the tests sometimes themselves involve code generation? (Maybe
> just dynamic code generation.)

I meant the question more generally, but in the case of the rspec
generators, they do generate tests using the same command line
arguments that rails uses generate the application code. So if you
generate a resource with a 'name' attribute, the generated tests for
the new and edit forms expect there to be a form with an input for
'name'.

render "/companies/new.html.erb"

response.should have_tag("form[action=?][method=post]", companies_path) do
  with_tag("input#company_name[name=?]", "company[name]")
end

What's your gut reaction to that? "Too much"? "Oh, cool"? "Ewwwwww"? "Awesome"?

>
>
> David
>
> --
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>
>