Making RSpec concise

November 10, 2008 code 6 min read

A common criticism of RSpec is that it is very verbose. I don’t necessarily agree (or care), but I thought it would be fun to see how concise I could make my specs.

Here are some simple specs from a client project:

describe Company do
  before do
    @company = Company.new
  end

  it "should have many classifications" do
    @company.should have_many(:classifications)
  end

  it "should have many industries through companies" do
    @company.should have_many(:industries, :through => :classifications)
  end

  it "should have many locations" do
    @company.should have_many(:locations)
  end

  it "should have many leads" do
    @company.should have_many(:leads)
  end

  it "should have many jobs" do
    @company.should have_many(:jobs)
  end

  it "should have many notes" do
    @company.should have_many(:notes)
  end

  it "should have many phones ordered by phone type position" do
    @company.should have_many(:phones, :as => :phonable,
      :include => :phone_type, :order => 'phone_types.position')
  end

  it "should have many events" do
    @company.should have_many(:events)
  end

  it "should have many interests" do
    @company.should have_many(:interests)
  end

  it "should belong_to an exchange" do
    @company.should belong_to(:exchange)
  end

  it 'should belong_to a primary_contact' do
    @company.should belong_to(:primary_contact, :class_name => 'Job')
  end

  it 'should have many articles' do
    @company.should have_many(:articles,
      :order => 'articles.date DESC, articles.created_at DESC')
  end
end

These specs check the declared associations on our company model using some custom matchers. They are not very complicated, but are somewhat repetitive. Each example has a description that is basically a duplication of the implementation.

Step 1: remove the description

For a while now, RSpec has had the ability for matchers to be self describing. If you don’t pass a block to #it, it uses the description provided by the matcher.

it do
  @company.should have_many(:jobs)
end

When that spec is run, it gives the output “should have a has_many association called :jobs”. Depending on what you’re speccing, the built in description isn’t always clear, but in this case it’s great.

See #simple_matcher if you want to create custom matchers with useful error messages.

Step 2: remove the subject

So the duplication within each example is gone, but if you look at the full spec above, each example calls @company.should. Accessing an instance variable isn’t what I would consider “duplication”, but thanks to a nifty new feature added to RSpec today, it’s now unnecessary noise. We can simply call #should within our example, and it will use a new instance of the described type as the “subject”.

describe Company do
  it do
    should have_many(:jobs)
  end
end

You can customize the subject if you don’t simply want a new instance.

describe Company, 'validations' do
  subject { Company.new(valid_company_attributes) }

  it do
    should be_valid
  end
end

Note: As David Chelimsky points out in the comments, this is not released yet and is subject to change.

Step 3: One-liner

Lastly, we can use the one line block:

describe Company do
  it { should have_many(:classifications) }
  it { should have_many(:events) }
  it { should have_many(:interests) }
  it { should have_many(:jobs) }
  it { should have_many(:leads) }
  it { should have_many(:locations) }
  it { should have_many(:notes) }
  it { should have_many(:articles, :order => 'articles.date DESC, articles.created_at DESC') }
  it { should have_many(:industries, :through => :classifications) }
  it { should have_many(:phones, :as => :phonable, :include => :phone_type, :order => 'phone_types.position') }
  it { should belong_to(:exchange) }
  it { should belong_to(:primary_contact, :class_name => 'Job') }
end

That’s pretty sexy. I wasn’t able to do this with all of the specs in my app, but it worked with quite a few of them.

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