controller is nil in global before(:each, :type => :controller) hook

[trkoch]

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.before(:each, :type => :controller) do
     # controller is nil
  end
end

This has already been reported in the legacy branch, see https://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec/issues/23. I figured I move it to the correct branch, hope thats okay.

[dchelimsky]

Just to document: the issue here is that the controller is initialized in a before hook that is registered later than the global before hook.

[dchelimsky]

I'm going to leave this issue open for now, but there is another way to get what you're after:

shared_context 'foo', :type => "controller" do
  before(:each) do
    # controller is _not_ nil
  end
end

This is a pretty serious bug, and it hasn't been updated in a few months. Any plans to tackle it?

Testing locally with the solution of dchelimsky, it has weird behavior. The controllers in the shared context becomes AnonymousController, all tests fail, and "controller" is actually an instance of: RSpec::Core::Hooks::AfterHook

[dchelimsky]

This is a chicken/egg problem. Global before hooks are registered before local before hooks (which is the more common use case, so we can't simply reverse it). Since the controller is declared in a local hook, it doesn't exist yet when the global hook is run.

One way to solve the problem would be to add an API for ranking before hooks, but that would require a fair bit of thought and a fair bit of rearchitecting of rspec-core to support. I'm open to it, but it's not high on my priority list so somebody else is going to have to drive the conversation and probably the development of the solution.

[dchelimsky]

@robgleeson re: your 2nd comment, can you post the code?

[andriusch]

Had the same problem, we have app that requires user to always be logged in so I needed to login user before each controller test. This is what I came up with:

module RSpecLogin
  extend ActiveSupport::Concern
  included do
    before do
      # login code here
    end
  end
end

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.include RSpecLogin, :type => :controller
end

[cemeng]

@sinsiliux's solution works well for our app

[jfirebaugh]

@dchelimsky An issue with the shared_context solution is that the shared context gets run once for every level of describe nesting, while a before would only get run once. So if you nest describes, you have to make sure the shared context is idempotent and that it doesn't mess up any additional initialization that other before blocks do in between two executions of the shared context block.

[dchelimsky]

I just reopened rspec/rspec-core#126 to reinstate prepend_before (and append_after) to resolve this issue.

[preethiramdev]

@dchelimsky Is this still an open issue that I can work on? Or is this something you would prefer to leave for later?

[dchelimsky]

@preethiramdev this is new behavior that is backward compatible, so yes, fair game. However, the place to fix it is rspec-core (see rspec/rspec-core#126).

[preethiramdev]

Ive submitted a pull request to fix this against issue #126 over at rspec-core