Request spec only first context is success - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have a request spec and I wanted to test CRUD.
The problem is whatever request I put first succeeds, but the rest that follows fail. (Meaning, in the case below, GET will succeed, but POST will fail. If
I switch the 2 context blocks, POST then succeeds, then GET fails).
The failing test says the response is 401 Unauthorized. I'm not sure if the api_key suddenly becomes invalid or something. Or it has something to do with the role I assigned it. (I assigned a system_admin role to the user to be able to CRUD via cancancan)
The way that makes it all work is if I put all requests in one big it block (which I think is not good practice since it returns only 1 passing example, when in reality I have more than 1.)
I've also tried signing in my user again in each block but still the same thing happens.
I am very new to RSpec so any help would be appreciated. Thank you very much!
require 'rails_helper'
RSpec.describe "Departments", type: :request do
user = FactoryBot.build(:user)
role = FactoryBot.build(:role, name: "system_admin")
user.add_role(role.name)
headers = { "x-app-api-key" => user.api_key }
before do
sign_in user
end
describe "CRUD /v1/departments" do
context "GET" do
it "called get" do
get api_departments_path, headers: headers
expect(response.content_type).to eq("application/json; charset=utf-8")
expect(response).to have_http_status(:success)
end
end
context "POST" do
it "called post" do
post api_departments_path, headers: headers, params: { name: "department" }
expect(response.content_type).to eq("application/json; charset=utf-8")
expect(response).to have_http_status(:success)
end
end
end
end

Answer 1

There are a LOT of problems with this spec. First off the bat is your use of local variables instead of let/let!:
require 'rails_helper'
RSpec.describe "Departments", type: :request do
user = FactoryBot.build(:user)
role = FactoryBot.build(:role, name: "system_admin")
user.add_role(role.name)
The problem with this is that these variables will be set when RSpec sets up the spec and not for each example. So provided you actually did insert the records into the database they will still be wiped after the first example is run and all the subsequent examples will fail.
So lets fix that problem:
require 'rails_helper'
RSpec.describe "Departments", type: :request do
let(:user) { FactoryBot.create(:user) }
let(:role) { FactoryBot.create(:role, name: "system_admin") }
before do
user.add_role(role.name)
end
let is evaluated once per example and then memoized.
Note the use of create instead of build which saves the record in the database so that it can actually be accessed from the controller.
Then there is the problem that these tests don't actually provide any value or describe the behavior of the application that you're testing besides testing the http response code.
Test your application - not your tests. If the failure message doesn't tell you anything about what part of the application doesn't work the test is near worthless.
require 'rails_helper'
RSpec.describe "Departments", type: :request do
let(:user) { FactoryBot.create(:user) }
let(:role) { FactoryBot.create(:role, name: "system_admin") }
let(:headers) do
{ "x-app-api-key" => user.api_key }
end
let(:json) { response.parsed_body }
before do
user.add_role(role.name)
sign_in user
end
describe "GET /v1/departments" do
let(:departments) { FactoryBot.create_list(:department, 5) }
it "responds with a list of the departments" do
get api_departments_path, headers: headers
expect(response).to be_successful
# #todo ensure the JSON response contains the expected departments
end
end
describe "POST /v1/departments" do
context "with invalid parameters" do
let(:params) { { name: "" } } # this should just be an invalid or incomplete set of attributes
it "doesn't create a department" do
expect do
post api_departments_path, headers: headers, params: params
end.to_not change(Department, :count)
expect(response).to have_http_status(:unprocessable_entity)
end
end
context "with valid parameters" do
let(:params) { FactoryBot.attributes_for(:department) }
it "creates a department" do
expect do
post api_departments_path, headers: headers, params: params
end.to change(Department, :count).by(1)
expect(response).to have_http_status(:created)
# #todo test that either a JSON representation is returned
# or that the response contains a location header with the URI
# to the resource
end
end
end
end
Testing the content type is largely superflous as you set the content type in the defaults for an API app and testing the JSON responses would fail if its not returning application/json.