test_spec_on_rails continued...

Yesterday, I was very happy because all my controller tests (using test/spec, of course) were passing individually.

Today I decided to run rake test:functionals just to make sure they played well together. CRASH! BOOM! OTHER LOUD NOISES!

The problem, after two hours of debugging, is that I was creating the same context in different controllers. DocumentationControllerTest had a "A guest" context, and so did "AccountControllerTest" and "WelcomeControllerTest"

Test/spec is perfectly happy to merge these . . . I just didn't realize it merged them. I assumed that it would scope the context to its parent TestClass. No such luck.

The solution is quite easy, and really not all that bad practice anyway: scope your contexts manually. For example:

class WelcomeControllerTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
 context "The Welcome Controller" do
   context "A guest" do
     ...
   end
   context "A logged-in user" do
     ...
   end
 end
end