I'm going to argue that your design is off, and then ignore the rest of your
post :)
class Person < Struct.new(:name, :age)
VOTING_AGE = 18
def voter?
age >= VOTING_AGE
end
end
Now your tests become very simple:
Person.new('Jenny', 17).should_not be_voter
Person.new('Bob', 18).should be_voter
Why you want a Person.get_voters method to select voters from a list, I'm not
really sure. You can always just do:
voters = collection_of_people.select {|p| p.voter?}
Also, RSpec has two mechanisms for testing collections the way you want (so I
guess I'm not ignoring your post after all).
If you only care about inclusion, you can use the include matcher:
jenny = Person.new('Jenny', 17)
bob = Person.new('Bob', 18)
sally = Person.new('Sally', 20)
voters = Person.get_voters(jenny, bob, sally)
voters.should include(bob, sally)
voters.should_not include(jenny)
there is also the set equality matcher, which checks that the contents of two
collections are equal irrespective of order:
voters.should =~ [bob, sally]
Pat
On Feb 23, 2010, at 10:18 AM, Pete Hodgson wrote:
> Hi all,
> I've tried to figure out whether rspec has any features to make it
> easier to make assertions against the elements of a collection, but I
> haven't had any luck finding anything so far. I thought I'd explain
> the problem here, and propose a potential feature that might mitigate
> it.
>
> Let's say I have a Person class:
>
> class Person < Struct.new( :name, :age )
>
> VOTING_AGE = 18
> def self.get_voters( people )
> people.reject{ |person| person.age < VOTING_AGE }
> end
>
> end
>
> As you can see we have a method here which filters a collection of
> people, returning only those people old enough to vote. If I were to
> test this method in rspec I might write:
>
> describe 'Person vote filtering' do
> it 'filters out people younger than voting age' do
> people = [
> Person.new( 'jenny', 18 ),
> Person.new( 'dave', 12 ),
> Person.new( 'paul', 19 ),
> Person.new( 'lisa', 17 )
> ]
>
> voters = Person.get_voters( people )
>
> voter_names = voters.map{ |p| p.name }
> voter_names.should == ['jenny','paul']
> end
> end
>
> This works, but having to manually pull out the voter names into a
> seperate collection just in order to check who was filtered and who
> wasn't has always seemed clunky to me. What I would prefer is to be
> able to check whether the collection contains person who matching my
> expectations. Say I have a custom matcher:
>
> Spec::Matchers.define :be_named do |expected|
> match do |actual|
> actual.name == expected
> end
> end
>
> Then I'd like to be able to write something like
>
> voters.should( have(2).people )
> voters.should( have_one_that( be_named('jenny') ) )
> voters.should( have_one_that( be_named('paul') ) )
>
> or even:
>
> voters.should( have_elements_that(
> be_named( 'jenny' ),
> be_named( 'paul' )
> )
>
> To me this is a lot clearer - although the method names and how
> they're composed into the DSL could clearly use some work ;).
>
> Now, for the trivial case I've been using as an example it would
> probably be overkill, but I often find myself writing fairly
> convuluted code at the end of a test just to figure out whether a
> collection contains an element that matches some complex predicate. It
> seems to me that if rspec had the generic ability to apply matchers to
> the elements of a collection it would raise the level of
> expressiveness for this kind of tests.
>
> Thoughts? Does Rspec already support something like this that I'm just
> not aware of? If I were to write a patch implementing this would it
> have any chance of being accepted?
>
> Cheers,
> Pete
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