making functional test failures readable

By zenspider on Rails

Tired of your rails functional test failures being completely unreadable? I'm not terribly fond of rails' assert_tag but it is better than nothing. However, I never like to read something like the following:

expected tag, but no tag found matching {:attributes=>{:action=>"/admin/themes/update/1"}, :tag=>"form"} in:
"<!DOCTYPE [...3k worth of crap cut...]</html>".

Ugh! It just does nothing to help you and since it isn't expressed as a diff, unit_diff is no help in this arena. I have however figured out how to make it much more manageable with the following snippets:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
 def initialize(testing=false)
 super()
 self.class.layout(nil) if testing
 end
 [...]
end

and then in your functional tests:

def setup
 @controller = MyController.new(true)
 [...]
end

Now your failures contain just the content from the page:

expected tag, but no tag found matching {:attributes=>{:action=>"/admin/themes/update/1"}, :tag=>"form"} in:
"\n<ul>\n <li>Name: Blue</li>\n <li>Folder: blue</li>\n <li>Description: A Plain blue theme</li>\n <li>Masthead: Blue</li>\n <li>Editor: n/a</li>\n</ul>\n\n<a href=\"/admin/themes/show/1\">Cancel Editing</a>\n".