Testing associations with rspec-rails 3.0.1 and shoulda doesn't work

Question

Currently, with rspec-rails (2.14.2), I test my associations in model specs with the shoulda (3.5.0) gem like so:

# app/models/user.rb
class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  belongs_to :school

end

# spec/models/user_spec.rb
describe User do

  it { should belong_to :school }

end

After some research, I hit a wall trying to make association-related assertions work (they all seem to fail).

Error message:

1) User
     Failure/Error: it { is_expected.to belong_to :school }
     NoMethodError:
       undefined method `belong_to' for #<RSpec::ExampleGroups::School:0x007f8a4c7a68d0>
     # ./spec/models/user.rb:4:in `block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'

So my questions are:

Can you test associations without the shoulda gem? This doesn't seem possible based on what I've seen with the "expect" syntax.
Does the shoulda gem break with rspec 3.0.1 for everyone? Is there a workaround?

I have the "shoulda" gem, but not "shoulda-matchers". This is the way I had it set up before. — Randy Burgess, Jun 04 '14 at 05:29
I think you should make it [like this](https://github.com/thoughtbot/shoulda-matchers#rspec) — zishe, Jun 04 '14 at 05:30
I think your association should be `belongs_to :school` (School is uniq). Maybe this is a source of problem — gotva, Jun 04 '14 at 05:40
@govta - that was just a syntax error when I moved the example over. It's correct in the app and I corrected it here. — Randy Burgess, Jun 04 '14 at 12:38
Then please post the current error message. The one you posted is now old and I'll probably remove it. Makes for a confusing read right now. — Michael Durrant, Jun 04 '14 at 12:43
The error message is the same as before. I simply made a syntax error in the example. Sorry to fluster you. — Randy Burgess, Jun 04 '14 at 12:45

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 04 '14 at 15:29

shoulda-matchers is the gem that provides association, validation, and other matchers.

The shoulda gem (which we also make) is for using shoulda-matchers with Test::Unit (and also provides some nice things like contexts and the ability to use strings as test names). But if you're on RSpec, you'll want to use shoulda-matchers, not shoulda.

Randy Burgess · Answer 2 · 2014-06-05T04:19:40.770

4

This is the way it works, now with the shoulda-matchers gem and the "expect" syntax

describe User, type: :model do
  it { is_expected.to belong_to :school }
end

edited Jun 05 '14 at 04:19

answered Jun 05 '14 at 01:46

Randy Burgess

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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 04 '14 at 12:50

2

I do not believe you need the gem for the basic associations.

You might be having an issues if you haven't actually assigned your user to your school. You need to populate the foreign key, not just use the relationship without having done that.

So you may need to do

@school = School.new
@user = User.new
@school.users << @user

it { should belong_to :school } # within the user block

or

expect(@user).to belong_to @school

answered Jun 04 '14 at 12:50

Michael Durrant

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The should-matchers test the associations as they are assigned in the model. That works fine with rails-rspec 2.x. Thus, my question is whether I can do the same test with an expect syntax. – Randy Burgess Jun 04 '14 at 12:54
I agree, why to type additional 3 more lines of rspec to make sure you put 1 (e.g. belong_to) in code that you are testing? – Katarzyna May 14 '15 at 23:10

Testing associations with rspec-rails 3.0.1 and shoulda doesn't work

3 Answers3

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