japh(r) by Chris Strom: How Many Ways Can I Screw Up a Simple Form?

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Having built my feedback form and the action to which it submits, I am ready to work my way back out to the Cucumber scenario driving this particular feature:

Telling Webrat to click the "submit" button is not specific enough. Webrat needs a value or id attribute. So I will rewrite that step as:

When I click the "Send Comments" button

I can define that step with:

When /^click the "([^\"]+)" button$/ do |button_text|
  click_button button_text
end

When I run this scenario, I find:

  Scenario: Give feedback to the authors of this fantastic site
    Given 25 yummy meals
    When I view the site's homepage
    And I click "Send us comments"
    Then I should see a feedback form
    When I fill out the form with effusive praise
    And click the "Send Comments" button
      Could not find button "Send Comments" (Webrat::NotFoundError)
      features/site.feature:53:in `And click the "Send Comments" button'
    Then I should see a thank you note

Hunh. Cannot find the "Send Comments" button? I was sure I had that in the Haml template:

...
  %label
    Message
    %textarea{:name => "message", :rows => 8, :cols => 55}
  %input{:type => "submit", :name => "Send Comments"}

Ah. I gave the button a name, but not a value. Another obvious mistake on my part caught by Cucumber. I give the button a proper name:

...
  %label
    Message
    %textarea{:name => "message", :rows => 8, :cols => 55}
  %input{:type => "submit", :name => "b", :value => "Send Comments"}

And then I re-run the Cucumber scenario, only to find:

  Scenario: Give feedback to the authors of this fantastic site
    Given 25 yummy meals
    When I view the site's homepage
    And I click "Send us comments"
    Then I should see a feedback form
    When I fill out the form with effusive praise
    And I click the "Send Comments" button
      PATH_INFO must start with / (Rack::Lint::LintError)
      (eval):7:in `get'
      features/site.feature:53:in `And I click the "Send Comments" button'
    Then I should see a thank you note

This error I do not quite understand. If I am working in the top level URL space of a site (e.g. http://eeecooks.com/feedback), then I expect any form submitted without an absolute URL to be relative to the top-level namespace (i.e. email should be submitted to http://eeecooks.com/email). No matter, I change:

%form{:action => "email"}

to:

%form{:action => "/email"}

And finally that step is passing. The last step is to verify that the user now sees a "thanks for the feedback" message. It is a step so simple that it almost seems not worth bothering. Still, it cannot hurt to define, especially since the step is so easy to define:

Then /^I should see a thank you note$/ do
  response.should have_selector("h1", :content => "Thank You")
end

Finally, I get to see my simple feedback scenario is all of its glory:

  Scenario: Give feedback to the authors of this fantastic site
    Given 25 yummy meals
    When I view the site's homepage
    And I click "Send us comments"
    Then I should see a feedback form
    When I fill out the form with effusive praise
    And I click the "Send Comments" button
    Then I should see a thank you note
      expected following output to contain a <h1>Thank You</h1> tag:
      <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
      <html><body><h1>Not Found</h1></body></html>
       (Spec::Expectations::ExpectationNotMetError)
      features/site.feature:54:in `Then I should see a thank you note'

Aaarrrgh! Not found?! How can that be?

After much soul searching and questioning of my ability as a developer, I finally ask myself how could it not be found? It is clearly defined in my Sinatra application:

post '/email' do
  message = <<"_EOM"
From: #{params[:name]}
Email: #{params[:email]}

#{params[:message]}
_EOM

  Pony.mail(:to      => "us _at_ eeecooks.com".gsub(/\s*_at_\s*/, '@'),
            :subject => params[:subject],
            :body    => message)

  haml :email
end

The answer, of course, is in the first word of that code snippet: post. The /email action is only defined for POST actions, not GETs. Changing the form action definition in the Haml template will resolve everything:

%form{:action => "/email", :method => "post"}

Finally, I get:

cstrom@jaynestown:~/repos/eee-code$ cucumber features -n \
    -s "Give feedback to the authors of this fantastic site"
Sinatra::Test is deprecated; use Rack::Test instead.
Feature: Site

  So that I may explore many wonderful recipes and see the meals in which they were served
  As someone interested in cooking
  I want to be able to easily explore this awesome site

  Scenario: Give feedback to the authors of this fantastic site
    Given 25 yummy meals
    When I view the site's homepage
    And I click "Send us comments"
    Then I should see a feedback form
    When I fill out the form with effusive praise
sendmail: 553 jaynestown.mail.rr.com does not exist
    And I click the "Send Comments" button
    Then I should see a thank you note

1 scenario
7 passed steps

Oops. An actual email is trying to go out there. If I had sendmail configured correctly, I would be spamming myself right now.

Cucumber is an awesome full-stack testing tool, but, at least in this case, I do not want to test the entire stack. What I want to do is stub out the Pony.mail call right before the form is submitted:

When /^I click the "([^\"]*)" button$/ do |button_text|
  # Don't send email in tests
  Pony.stub!(:mail)
  click_button button_text
end

That will not work because Cucumber don't do stubbing:

  Scenario: Give feedback to the authors of this fantastic site
    Given 25 yummy meals
    When I view the site's homepage
    And I click "Send us comments"
    Then I should see a feedback form
    When I fill out the form with effusive praise
    And I click the "Send Comments" button
      undefined method `stub!' for Pony:Module (NoMethodError)
      features/site.feature:53:in `And I click the "Send Comments" button'
    Then I should see a thank you note

Cucumber really is a full stack testing framework. Fortunately, Bryan Helmkamp has written some nice instructions for including RSpec stubbing and mocking in Cucumber. Following those instructions, I add this to my Cucumber's support/env.rb:

# RSpec mocks / stubs
require 'spec/mocks'

Before do
  $rspec_mocks ||= Spec::Mocks::Space.new
...
end

After do
  begin
    $rspec_mocks.verify_all
  ensure
    $rspec_mocks.reset_all
  end
...

And now, I am done with this scenario:

Tomorrow, I will likely add another small feature to the feedback mechanism before moving onto RSS feeds.

japh(r) by Chris Strom

Friday, June 26, 2009

How Many Ways Can I Screw Up a Simple Form?

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