How to use Rspec with Rails (or how to use it correctly)

Question

I can't seem to get these Rspec tests to pass. I just don't know what exactly I'm doing wrong. Any advice? These tests make sure that every hunt has an edit and delete link when admins are logged in. I'm using FactoryGirl to generate a test admin user and a test hunt.

Here are the tests.

    describe "for users who are admins" do
      before(:each) do
        admin = FactoryGirl.create(:user, :email => "admin@example.com", :admin => true)
        test_sign_in(admin)
      end

    it "should show edit link" do
      get 'index'
      Hunt.each do |hunt|
        response.should have_selector('a', :href => "edit",
                                       :content => "edit")    
      end
    end

    it "should show delete link" do
      get 'index'
      Hunt.each do |hunt|
        response.should have_selector('a', :href => "delete"  ,
                                       :content => "delete")  
      end
    end

Here's the code I'm testing. It's from views/hunts.html.erb

    <h1>All Hunts</h1>

    <%= will_paginate %>

    <ul>
      <% @hunts.each do |hunt| %>
            <li>
          <%= link_to hunt.name, hunt %>
          <% if current_user && current_user.admin? %>
            | <%= link_to "edit", edit_hunt_path(hunt) %>
            | <%= link_to "delete", hunt, :method => :delete, :confirm => "You   
                          sure?",  :title => "Delete #{hunt.name}" %>


          <% end %>
        </li>
      <% end %>
    </ul>
    <%= will_paginate %>

    <%= link_to( "Create New Hunt", '/hunts/new') %>  

And here's the relevant part of the hunt controller.

class HuntsController < ApplicationController

  def index
     @title = "All Hunts"
     @hunts = Hunt.paginate(:page => params[:page])
  end

    ....
end

When I run rspec, this is what appears.

    </li>
            <li>
      <a href="/hunts/30">---
   - optio
   - et
   - sunt
   </a>
        | <a href="/hunts/30/edit">edit</a>
        | <a href="/hunts/30" data-confirm="You sure?" data-method="delete" rel="nofollow" title="Delete ---
   - optio
   - et
   - sunt
   ">delete</a>

Finally, here's my factories.rb file.

FactoryGirl.define do
  factory :user do
    sequence(:name)  { |n| "Person #{n}" }
    sequence(:email) { |n| "person_#{n}@example.com"}   
    password "foobar"
    password_confirmation "foobar"

    factory :admin do
      admin true
    end
  end

  factory :hunt do
    name "Test Hunt" 
  end
end         

UPDATE: So I dropped the "a" from the original tests. I also rewrote the test so that it looks at each hunt on page 1.

      describe "for users who are admins" do
        before(:each) do
            admin = FactoryGirl.create(:user, :email => "admin@example.com", :admin => true)
            test_sign_in(admin)
        end

        it "should show edit link" do
          get 'index'
          Hunt.paginate(:page => 1).each do |hunt|
            response.should have_selector(:href => "edit",
                                           :content => "edit")
          end 
        end

        it "should show delete link" do
          get 'index'
          Hunt.paginate(:page => 1).each do |hunt|
            response.should have_selector(:href => "delete",
                                           :content => "delete")  
          end
        end
      end 

So now I've got a different error:

HuntsController GET 'index' for users who are admins should show edit link
 Failure/Error: response.should have_selector(:href => "edit",
 Nokogiri::CSS::SyntaxError:
   unexpected '{' after ''

I tried googling this error, but haven't had much luck. Seen it before? I'm not sure what syntax I'm messing up.

Answer 1

What if you change the selector to the following:

it "should show an 'edit' link" do
  get :index
  ...
  response.should have_selector('a', :href => edit_hunt_path(hunt), :content => 'edit')
  ...
end

If you are using Capybara then you can simply use have_link() instead of have_selector().