Bold Cucumber Scenario

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Another Cucumber scenario went green yesterday. Green, but not much bold:



Bold text in Cucumber output indicates that it is consumed for direct use when the running individual steps. For example, consider the first Given step:

Given a "Even Fried, They Won't Eat It" meal enjoyed in May of 2009

This steps builds a meal, using the text "Even Fried, They Won't Eat It" as the title and the text "May of 2009" as the date for the meal.

As much as possible, it is a good idea to use Cucumber text when implementing the steps behind them. Re-using text means that the human readable text in the scenario is usually matching up with human readable text in the application itself. As a general rule of thumb, the more human readable a web page, the better.

There is no bold text in the four should / should not steps that check for links to dates. Each of those has to hard-code the application representation of those date:

Then /^I should see a link to May of 2009$/ do
  response.should have_selector("a", :content => "2009-05")
end

"May of 2009" is easier to read, which is why I wrote it that way in the feature description. I should have carried that readability over into the application. If I do so now, I can also increase the bold in the Cucumber output, DRYing things up a bit as well.

First up is a helper to translate date fragments like "2009-05" into "May 2009". In other words:

describe "month_text" do
  it "should increase readability of an ISO8601 date fragment" do
    month_text("2009-05").
      should == "May 2009"
  end
end

This can be implemented with a little help from strftime:

    def month_text(date_frag)
      Date.parse("#{date_frag}-01").strftime("%B %Y")
    end

To get the navigation between month to use this date format, I would like to pass it to the link_to_adjacent_view_date helper as an optional block:

    it "should link to block text, if supplied" do
      link_to_adjacent_view_date("2009-04", @count_by_month) do
        "foo"
      end.
        should have_selector("a",
                             :href    => "/meals/2009/05",
                             :content => "foo")
    end

More specifically, I want the link_to_adjacent_view_date helper to yield with the adjacent date fragment so that it can be humanized by month_text:

    it "should link to block text + date, if block is given" do
      link_to_adjacent_view_date("2009-04", @count_by_month) do |date|
        "foo #{date} bar"
      end.
        should have_selector("a",
                             :href    => "/meals/2009/05",
                             :content => "foo 2009-05 bar")
    end

Getting those two examples to pass is a simple matter of yielding appropriately in the helper. Something along the lines of:

        link_text = block_given? ? yield(next_result['key']) : next_result['key']

With those examples passing, I update the meals-by-months Haml view such that the navigation links use the new optional block and the humanizing month_text helper:

%div.navigation
  =link_to_adjacent_view_date(@month, @count_by_year, :previous => true) { |d| month_text(d) }
  |
  =link_to_adjacent_view_date(@month, @count_by_year) { |d| month_text(d) }

Finally (after verifying that all specs still pass), I work my way back out to the Cucumber scenario. I remove the "of"s from the steps so that they read "I should see a link to May 2009" (instead of "May of 2009"). Then I can consolidate the step implementations down to:

Then /^I should see a link to (.+)$/ do |date|
  response.should have_selector("a", :content => date)
end

Then /^I should not see a link to (.+)$/ do |date|
  response.should_not have_selector("a", :content => date)
end

Running the scenario now, I find much more bold text in the output:



A little bit of refactoring and my code is DRYer and more human-readable.
(commit)

That completes this red-green-refactor cycle. Tomorrow, it's on to the next scenario.