/hw-acceptance-unit-test-cycle

Primary LanguageRuby

Acceptance-Unit Test Cycle

In this assignment you will use a combination of Acceptance and Units tests with the Cucumber and RSpec tools to add a "find movies with same director" feature to RottenPotatoes.

(If you're not reading this directly on GitHub, you'll need to temporarily visit the GitHub repo.)

To start: in this repo, click the green "Use This Template" button above to create a clean copy of the repo in your own GitHub account.

Learning Goals

After you complete this assignment, you should be able to:

  • Create and run simple Cucumber scenarios to test a new feature
  • Use RSpec to create unit tests that drive the creation of app code that lets the Cucumber scenario pass
  • Understand where to modify a Rails app to implement the various parts of a new feature, since a new feature often touches the database schema, model(s), view(s), and controller(s)

Introduction and Setup

Clone your copy of this template repo to your development environment (do not clone this reference repo or you'll be unable to push your changes);

git clone https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/hw-acceptance-unit-test-cycle

Or if you've been using ssh as your GitHub transport:

git clone git@github.com:YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/hw-acceptance-unit-test-cycle

Once you have the clone of the repo:

  1. Change into the rottenpotatoes directory: cd hw-acceptance-unit-test-cycle/rottenpotatoes

  2. Run bundle install --without production to make sure all gems are properly installed. NOTE: If Bundler complains that the wrong Ruby version is installed, verify that rvm is installed (for example, rvm --version) and say rvm list to see which Ruby versions are available and rvm use version to make a particular version active. If no versions satisfying the Gemfile dependency are installed, you can say rvm install version to install a new version, then rvm use version to use it. Then you can try bundle install again.

  3. Create the initial database schema:

bundle exec rake db:migrate
bundle exec rake db:test:prepare

  1. You can optionally add some seed data in db/seeds.rb and run rake db:seed to add it.

  2. Double check that RSpec is correctly set up by running rake spec. (Note--not rake rspec as you might think. Sorry.) Although there are no RSpec tests yet, the task should run without error.

  3. Double check that Cucumber is correctly set up by running rake cucumber. We've provided a couple of scenarios that will fail, which you can use as a starting point, in features/movies_by_director.feature.

Read the Cucumber failure error messages. The first test failure should be "unknown attribute 'director' for Movie." What will you have to do to address that specific error? (Add something to a file, change the database, etc.)

You'll have to create and apply a migration that adds a director column to the movies table in the database.

Part 1: add a Director field to Movies

Create and apply a migration that adds the Director field to the movies table. The director field should be a string containing the name of the movie’s director.

  • Hint: you may find the add_column method of ActiveRecord::Migration useful.
  • Remember that once the migration is applied, you also have to do rake db:test:prepare to load the new post-migration schema into the test database.
Clearly, now that a new field has been added, we will have to modify the Views so that the user can see and enter values for that field. Do we also have to modify the model file in order for the new field to be "noticed"?

Nope. ActiveRecord infers the columns and their data types by inspecting the database. However, if we wanted to have a validation on that column, we'd have to specifically mention it in a validates call.

Look at the step definitions for the failing steps of the Cucumber scenarios. (Where would you find those definitions?) Based on the step definitions, which step(s) of the scenario file would you now expect to *pass* if you re-run Cucumber, and why?

Once this field is added, running rake cucumber should allow the Background: steps to pass, since they just use ActiveRecord directly to create movies with a Director field. But the other scenarios all manipulate the user interface (the views), which you have not yet modified, so they will still fail.

Verify that the Cucumber steps you expect to pass actually do pass.

Besides modifying the Views, will we have to modify anything in the controller? If so, what?

Yes: we have to add :director to the list of movie attributes in the def movie_params method in movies_controller.rb. Otherwise, even if that value is available as params["movie"]["director"], it will be "scrubbed" by the require and permit calls on params before the controller actions are able to see it.

Which controller actions, specifically, would fail to work correctly if we didn't make the above change?

create and update would fail, since they are the ones that expect a form submission in params in which params["movies"] should appear. The other actions do not expect or manipulate this form (and do not call the helper function movie_params) so they would not be affected.

Based on the above self-checks, you should be able to modify the controller and views as needed to be "aware" of the new Director field.

Part 2: use Acceptance and Unit tests to get new scenarios passing

We've provided three Cucumber scenarios in the file features/movies_by_director.feature to drive creation of 2 happy paths and 1 sad path of Search for Movies by Director. The first lets you add director info to an existing movie, and doesn't require creating any new views or controller actions, but does require modifying existing views, and will require creating a new step definition and possibly adding a line or two to features/support/paths.rb.

The second lets you click a new link on a movie details page "Find Movies With Same Director", and shows all movies that share the same director as the displayed movie.
For this you'll have to modify the existing Show Movie view, and you'll have to add a route, view and controller method for Find With Same Director.

The third handles the sad path, when the current movie has no director info but we try to do "Find with same director" anyway.

Going one Cucumber step at a time, use RSpec to create the appropriate controller and model specs to drive the creation of the new controller and model methods. At the least, you will need to write tests to drive the creation of:

  • a RESTful route for Find Similar Movies (HINT: use the 'match' syntax for routes as suggested in "Non-Resource-Based Routes" in the Rails Routing documentation. of ESaaS). You can also use the key :as to specify a name to generate helpers (i.e. search_directors_path) Note: you probably won’t test this directly in a spec, but a line in Cucumber or rspec will fail if the route is not correct.

  • a controller method to receive the click on "Find With Same Director", and grab the id (for example) of the movie that is the subject of the match (i.e. the one we're trying to find movies similar to)

  • a model method in the Movie model to find movies whose director matches that of the current movie.

Would this model method be a class method or instance method?

Technically it could be either. You could call it on a movie, the idea being that it returns other movies with the same director as its receiver, e.g. movie.others_by_same_director(). Or you could define it as a class method, e.g. Movie.with_director(director). In fact, it's great practice to write it both ways.

Verify that the Cucumber steps you expect to pass actually do pass.

Note: You should write at least 2 specs for your controller:

  1. When the specified movie has a director, it should...
  2. When the specified movie has no director, it should ...

and 2 specs for your model:

  1. it should return the correct matches for movies by the same director and
  2. it should not return matches of movies by different directors.

It's up to you to decide whether you want to handle the sad path of "no director" in the controller method or in the model method, but you must provide a test for whichever one you do. Remember to include the line require 'rails_helper' at the top of every *_spec.rb file.

Part 3: Code Coverage

We want you to report your code coverage as well.

Notice that the Gemfile includes the SimpleCov gem, and that the first two lines of rails_helper.rb file (which you should be requireing at the top of every *_spec.rb file) as well as the first two lines of features/support/env.rb (which Cucumber loads automatically when run) start the SimpleCov test coverage measurement.

Each time you run rspec or cucumber, SimpleCov generates a report in a directory named coverage/. Since both RSpec and Cucumber are so widely used, SimpleCov can intelligently merge the results, so running the tests for Rspec does not overwrite the coverage results from SimpleCov and vice versa.

To see the results, open coverage/index.html. You will see the code, but click the Run button at the top. This will spin up a web server with a link in the console you can click to see your coverage report.

Improve your test coverage by adding unit tests for untested or undertested code.

Submission:

Here are the instructions for submitting your assignment for grading. Submit a zip file containing the following files and directories of your app:

  • app/
  • config/
  • db/migrate
  • features/
  • spec/
  • Gemfile
  • Gemfile.lock

If you modified any other files, please include them too. If you are on a *nix based system, navigate to the root directory for this assignment and run

$ cd ..
$ zip -r acceptance-tests.zip rottenpotatoes/app/ rottenpotatoes/config/ rottenpotatoes/db/migrate rottenpotatoes/features/ rottenpotatoes/spec/ rottenpotatoes/Gemfile rottenpotatoes/Gemfile.lock

This will create the file acceptance-tests.zip, which you will submit.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Your submission must be zipped inside a rottenpotatoes/ folder so that it looks like so:

$ tree
.
└── rottenpotatoes
    ├── Gemfile
    ├── Gemfile.lock
    ├── app
    ...