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Rails BDD with Macros, I18n,... with Remarkable

by Sebastien Auvray on May 04, 2009 |

There are many ways to develop, test and integrate your Rails application: from TDD with the basic Test::Unit or ZenTest, to BDD with RSpec, Shoulda or Cucumber. It's also possible to write custom RSpec matchers.

It can be difficult to find the right tool and find out their best practices. Remarkable tries to unify the syntax and adds some more flavors to make Rails BDD painless.

Remarkable is a framework using its own DSL. Remarkable extends RSpec by providing macros and I18n support. It comes with an exhaustive collection of RSpec matchers covering all ActiveRecord validations with all options (:through, :source, :source_type, :class_name, :foreign_key, ...). It also has a collection of matchers for ActionController.

You can use either RSpec or Shoulda-like syntax (from the project website):

    1) it { should validate_numericality_of(:age).greater_than(18).only_integer }

    2) it { should validate_numericality_of(:age, :greater_than => 18, :only_integer => true) }


    3) should_validate_numericality_of :age, :greater_than => 18, :only_integer => true

    4) should_validate_numericality_of :age do |m|
         m.only_integer
         m.greater_than 18
         # Or: m.greater_than = 18

       end

At the end, you will be able to write easily your model specifications:

  describe Post do
    should_belong_to :user
    should_have_many :comments
    should_have_and_belong_to_many :tags


    should_validate_presence_of :body
    should_validate_presence_of :title
    should_validate_uniqueness_of :title, :allow_blank => true
  end

Remarkable 3.0.10 is available and quite an active project; Next releases should come up with more Rails matchers such as ActionView supports.