Run the same spec multiple times w/ different filters

[jfelchner]

Disclaimer: This request specifically stems from doing JavaScript acceptance tests with Capybara. Although I can see use cases for other situations.

All of my applications are coded so that they work fine with JS turned off, but with JS turned on, you get a lot of nice bells and whistles to make the user experience more pleasant. Because of this, from the user's point of view, the interactions on most things are identical; however I want to test that it works both w/ and w/o JS.

What I'd like is to be able to do is set some sort of flag to tell RSpec to run the same spec twice w/ each filter set. Something like:

it 'does this same thing with and without JS enabled', :run_with => [{:js => true}, {:js => false}] do
    # stuff here
end

I know this can be accomplished with shared examples but the resulting code is not very elegant.

It could additionally be used if you wanted to test w/o JS (Rack test) w/ JS on Firefox (Selenium) and w/ JS on Webkit (capybara-webkit) like this:

it 'does this same thing with and without JS enabled', :run_with => [{:js => false}, {:driver => :selenium}, {:driver => :webkit}] do
    # stuff here
end

I'm also envisioning a way to use custom filters to specify the run_with options so it's not quite so verbose such as:

it 'does this same thing with and without JS enabled', :run_with_all_drivers => true do
    # stuff here
end

Thoughts? I looked through the docs and the code and didn't see a way to currently do this with filters.

[myronmarston]

Filters aren't really designed to do this out of the box, but it's not difficult to get the behavior you're asking for w/o us making changes to RSpec:

[true, false].each do |js|
  it 'does this same thing with and without JS enabled', :run_with => {:js => js } do
    # stuff here
  end
end

If this is a common pattern you need, you can create a little DSL method for it:

module WithAndWithoutJS
  def with_and_without_js(&block)
    [true, false].each do |js|
      context "with :js => #{js}", :run_with => { :js => js } do
        module_eval(&block)
      end
    end
  end

  RSpec.configure { |c| c.extend self }
end

Then you can use this method like so:

describe "My integration spec" do
  with_and_without_js do
    it "does something with and without js" do
    end
  end
end

I think this is farely elegant. Changing how filters work to do what you're asking would be a fairly significant change that would add a future maintenance burden to the RSpec team for a feature that I would expect to be rarely used, so my instinct is to not add this to core.

That said, if you want to create an rspec-multi-filters gem that provides this functionality, feel free :).

[jfelchner]

@myronmarston as usual, it was just my ignorance of what RSpec could do. Thanks for taking the time out and clarifying. I think this will work nicely. :)

[assembler]

👍 awesome