learning test/spec

I'm starting to develop my tests with test/spec, which I really like, it makes doing BDD work really well with Ruby on Rails. It's a learning process, and I thought I would share some of it with you.

For one of my sites, telepathytest.com, I have a Sender class (a Sender is the one in the telepathy experiment who tries to telepathically "send" the symbol they are looking to the other person). Anywho, I had to test two of my Sender methods, which were:

# == Schema Information
# Schema version: 5
#
# Table name: senders
#
#  id                :integer(11)   not null, primary key
#  ip_address        :string(255)
#  idhash            :string(255)
#  created_at        :datetime
#  last_alive        :datetime
#  last_symbol_index :integer(11)
#  receiver_id       :integer(11)
#  user_id           :integer(11)
#  symbols_sent      :string(255)
#  state             :string(255)
#  archived          :boolean(1)
#                                                                                                                
class Sender < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
  has_one :telepathy_test

  before_create :generate_idhash
  before_create :generate_test

  def generate_idhash
    write_attribute "idhash", rand(0xffffffffffffffff).to_s(16)
  end

  # Generate the 10 symbols to be guessed, these are represented by                                              
  # integers between 1 and 5                                                                                     
  NUM_SYMBOLS = 10
  NUM_SYMBOL_TYPES = 5

  def generate_test
    symbol_string = ""
    NUM_SYMBOLS.times do
      symbol = rand(NUM_SYMBOL_TYPES) + 1
      symbol_string += symbol.to_s
    end
end

The specs that I came up with were:

  context "Adam sender" do

    fixtures :senders

    setup do
      @adam = senders(:adam)
      @adam.generate_idhash
      @adam.generate_test
    end

    specify "id hash should be between 0 and 0xffffffffffffffff" do
      @adam.idhash.to_i(16).should.be > 0
      @adam.idhash.to_i(16).should.be < 0xffffffffffffffff
    end

    specify "total number length of symbols_sent should be NUM_SYMBOLS" do
      @adam.symbols_sent.size.should.be Sender::NUM_SYMBOLS
    end

    specify "all symbols in symbols_sent should be in the range of 0..NUM_SYMBOL_TYPES" do
      @adam.symbols_sent.each_byte { |c|
        c.chr.to_i.should.be >= 1
        c.chr.to_i.should.be <= Sender::NUM_SYMBOL_TYPES
      }
    end
  end

And my fixtures file was really simple:

adam:
  id: 1
bob:
  id: 2