Add a .rspec file to the project's root directory (if not already there) to tell RSpec to tell Autotest to use RSpec's specialized Autotest class.
NOTE that rspec-core-2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 required an autotest/discover.rb file in the project's root directory. This worked with some, but not all versions of autotest and/or the autotest command that ships with ZenTest. This new approach will work regardless of which version of autotest/ZenTest you are using.
Earlier 2.0.0.beta versions depended on Webrat. As of rspec-rails-2.0.0.beta.20, this dependency and offers you a choice of using webrat or capybara. Just add the library of your choice to your Gemfile.
By default, controller specs do not render view templates. This keeps controller specs isolated from the content of views and their requirements.
NOTE that the template must exist, but it will not be rendered. This is different from rspec-rails-1.x, in which the template didn't need to exist, but ActionController makes a number of new decisions in Rails 3 based on the existence of the template. To keep the RSpec code free of monkey patches, and to keep the rspec user experience simpler, we decided that this would be a fair trade-off.
Rails changed the way it renders partials, so to set an expectation that a partial gets rendered, you need
render
view.should render_template(:partial => "widget/_row")
Introduced in rspec-rails-2.2, simulates the presence of view templates on the file system. This supports isolation from partials rendered by the vew template that is the subject of a view example:
stub_template "widgets/_widget.html.erb" => "This Content"
Earlier versions of the view generators generated stub_model with :new_record? => true. That is no longer recognized in rspec-rails-2, so you need to change
this:
stub_model(Widget, :new_record? => true)
to this:
stub_model(Widget).as_new_record
Generators in 2.0.0 final release will do the latter.