Finishing the Cucumber and Sinatra Spike

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I got the Cucumber with Sinatra spike underway last night. I could not quite seal the deal when I ran into some problems with Cucumber step definitions.

Recall that this was the output of cucumber -n features:

cstrom@jaynestown:~/repos/eee-code$ cucumber features -n
Feature: See a meal

  So that I can see an old meal
  As a web user
  I want to browse a single meal by permalink
  Scenario: View Meal
    Given a "Breakfast Elves" meal
    When I view the meal permalink
    Then the title should include "Breakfast Elves"


1 scenario
3 steps pending (3 with no step definition)

You can use these snippets to implement pending steps which have no step definition:

Given /^a "Breakfast Elves" meal$/ do
end

When /^I view the meal permalink$/ do
end

Then /^the title should include "Breakfast Elves"$/ do
end

Those very simple steps can be implemented in features/step_definitions/browse_meals.rb as:

Given /^a "Breakfast Elves" meal$/ do
end

When /^I view the meal permalink$/ do
  visit("/meals/2005-12-07-breakfast-elves")
end

Then /^the title should include "Breakfast Elves"$/ do
  response.body.should have_selector("h1", :content => "Breakfast Elves")
end

The Given step needs no implementation because it is being run against the CouchDB instance from two nights ago. That raises the question of how to deal with tearing down test data with Sinatra. For now, my guess is that it needs to be done manually—a side-effect of working so close to the metal. I will defer the real answer for another day.

Right now, I simply want to ensure that Cucumber is properly interacting with Sinatra. So, I run cucumber -n features and get the following:

Feature: See a meal

  So that I can see an old meal
  As a web user
  I want to browse a single meal by permalink
  Scenario: View Meal
    Given a "Breakfast Elves" meal
    When I view the meal permalink
    Then the title should include "Breakfast Elves"
      undefined method `has_selector?' for # (NoMethodError)
      ./features/step_definitions/browse_meals.rb:9:in `Then /^the title should include "Breakfast Elves"$/'
      features/browse_meals.feature:11:in `Then the title should include "Breakfast Elves"'


1 scenario
2 steps passed
1 step failed

Hunh, missing "has_selector?" method? Isn't that just part of Cucumber?

Turns out that, at least for the version of Cucumber and Webrat that I installed last night (0.1.16 and 0.4.2), the Webrat::SinatraSession instance needs to be extended with Webrat::Matchers. This may have been fixed in a more recent versions of Cucumber, which would explain why the sinatraCucumber / Sinatra documentation does not include it.

At any rate, the cucumber features/support/env.rb file is updated to extend the Webrat::SinatraSession thusly:

# NOTE: This must come before the require 'webrat', otherwise
# sinatra will look in the wrong place for it's views.
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../../spike'

# RSpec matchers
require 'spec/expectations'

# Webrat
require 'webrat'
Webrat.configure do |config|
  config.mode = :sinatra
end

World do
  session = Webrat::SinatraSession.new
  session.extend(Webrat::Matchers)
  session
end

Then re-running the Cucumber features, we get:

cstrom@jaynestown:~/repos/eee-code$ cucumber features -n
Feature: See a meal

  So that I can see an old meal
  As a web user
  I want to browse a single meal by permalink
  Scenario: View Meal
    Given a "Breakfast Elves" meal
    When I view the meal permalink
    Then the title should include "Breakfast Elves"


1 scenario
3 steps passed

Next Steps

As mentioned above, I have no answer for how to prevent previous step definitions from potentially impacting later steps (or even subsequent features). I need to answer that before I am done with this spike.

Another question occurred to me about whether to put meals and recipes into the same couch DB database or to put them into two separate DBs. Right now, my thinking is to put them into the same database and to rely on CouchDB views to pick out the right type.