More Recipe Helper Specs

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Tonight I try to finish off my recipe helpers.

First up is an example for wikifying kid nicknames. This was partly implemented last night, but I wanted to pull the data from CouchDB rather than from a hard-coded hash lookup. The example I try is:

    it "should lookup kid nicknames" do
      RestClient.stub!(:get).and_return('{"marsha":"the oldest Brady girl"}')
      wiki("[kid:marsha]").should contain("the oldest Brady girl")
    end

I am not testing the CouchDB integration point here in the helper, so I just stub it out. I try to make this example pass with this helper method:

    def wiki(original)
      text = original.dup
      text.gsub!(/\b(\d+)F/, "\\1° F")
      text.gsub!(/\[kid:(\w+)\]/m) { |kid| kid_nicknames[$1] }
      text.gsub!(/\[recipe:(\S+)\]/m) { |r| recipe_link($1) }
      RedCloth.new(text).to_html
    end

    def kid_nicknames
      @@kid_kicknames ||= JSON.parse(RestClient.get("#{@@db}/kids"))
    end

Unfortunately, I get an error due to the @@db class instance variable not being defined:

1)
NameError in 'wiki data stored in CouchDB should lookup kid nicknames in CouchDB'
uninitialized class variable @@db in Eee::Helpers
./helpers.rb:32:in `kid_nicknames'
./helpers.rb:26:in `wiki'
./helpers.rb:26:in `gsub!'
./helpers.rb:26:in `wiki'
./spec/eee_helpers_spec.rb:32:
./spec/eee_helpers_spec.rb:3:

Ick. The @@db instance variable will be available in the running Sinatra application. Since I am testing helpers in isolation, I get a nice failure.

I think that this is telling me that I need to move this code into a separate class (possibly a caching class). But for now, I cheat by adding a stub-able helper method _db. The specification then requires a context to stub out that method:

  context "data stored in CouchDB" do
    before(:each) do
      self.stub!(:_db).and_return("http://example.org/couchdb")
    end

    it "should lookup kid nicknames" do
      RestClient.stub!(:get).and_return('{"marsha":"the oldest Brady girl"}')
      wiki("[kid:marsha]").should contain("the oldest Brady girl")
    end

The code implementing this example is then:

    def kid_nicknames
      @@kid_kicknames ||= JSON.parse(RestClient.get("#{_db}/kids"))
    end

    def _db
      @@db
    end

Finishing the remaining helper specs are relatively trivial after that.
(commit)