I've been reading through the Rspec book to see if I missed any
tricks, and the discussion of before block use for context setup in
sec 12.6 struck me as interesting and something I had a knee-jerk
reaction to.
I think that when you are using nested examples to describe a context
change it is bad practice to allow any example within that group to
run outside of that context. This could happen simply because you
forgot to copy and paste (ouch) the setup code into your expectation.
before blocks solve this problem, but they are so tightly coupled to
the describe call in this case, why not make them a describe method
parameter? Ideally they would be the block passed to describe, but we
can't do that since the example group is using that already.
So I would propose something like this sketch:
describe "a new capacity 10 stack", :context => lambda {...@stack =
Stack.new(:capacity => 10)} do
describe "with 4 pushed ints", :context => lambda { 4.times { @stack
<< rand(:int) } } do
it "should allow push and return the new size" do
@stack.push(rand(:int)).should == 5
end
end
end
And the :context would just be executed as if it were a before block.
Of course you can arrange your specs so that the before block is
directly after the describe, or similar, but this seems a nice
alternative to me.
It's a nubile idea though. Thoughts?
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