Testing views in RSpec with namespaced elements

December 4, 2008 code 2 min read

We’ve been working on a Facebook app (yeah, I know, I’m sorry) and have had all kinds of fun challenges. We wanted to test FBML tags in the view, but the problem is that FBML uses namespaced elements.

It turns out, CSS selectors don’t work with namespaced elements. There is a CSS3 namespace module, but Rails’ #assert_select and RSpec’s #have_tag (built on #assert_select) don’t support them. We were going to have to turn to XPath, but #have_tag only supports CSS selectors.

But Hpricot supports XPath. A little searching revealed the rspec_hpricot_matchers plugin, which replaces have_tag with an Hpricot-backed version. The only problem is that the new version isn’t backwards compatible. So we forked it and renamed #have_tag to #match_element.

Usage

It’s pretty straight forward. Install the rspec_hpricot_matchers plugin, and include the module in the RSpec config in spec_helper.rb.

Spec::Runner.configure do |config|
  config.include RspecHpricotMatchers
end

Our view had something similar to:

<fb:multi-friend-input prefill_ids="<%= @friends.join(', ') %>" />

And in the view spec, we use #match_element with an XPath expression.

describe "things/edit.fbml.erb" do
  it "should prefill selected friends" do
    render "things/edit.fbml.erb"
    response.should match_element("//fb:multi-friend-input[@prefill_ids='333,444,555']")
  end
end

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