Testing Rails API controller POST with RSpec - ruby-on-rails

Question

As the title suggests I'm just trying to test the create action in my API controller with RSpec. The controller looks something like:
module Api
module V1
class BathroomController < ApplicationController
skip_before_action :verify_authenticity_token, only: [:create]`
def create
bathroom = Bathroom.new(bathroom_params)
bathroom.user = current_user
if bathroom.save
render json: { status: 'SUCCESS', message: 'Saved new bathroom', bathrooms: bathroom }, status: :ok
end
end
private
def bathroom_params
params.require(:bathroom).permit(:establishment, :address, :city, :state, :zip, :gender, :key_needed, :toilet_quantity)
end
end
end
end
Right now this is doing exactly what it should which is great. The test however...not so much. Here's what I have for the test portion:
describe "POST #create" do
let!(:bath) {{
establishment: "Fake Place",
address: "123 Main St",
city: "Cityton",
state: "NY",
zip: "11111",
gender: "Unisex",
key_needed: false,
toilet_quantity: 1
}}
let!(:params) { {bathroom: bath} }
it "receives bathroom data and creates a new bathroom" do
post :create, params: params
bathroom = Bathroom.last
expect(bathroom.establishment).to eq "Fake Place"
end
end
I'm sure there's more than one thing wrong here but I'm having trouble finding much information about the right way to go about testing this. Any insight or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I would skip controller specs altogether. Rails 5 has pretty much delegated ActionController::TestCase (which RSpec wraps as controller specs) to the junk drawer. Controller tests don't send real http requests and stub out key parts of Rails like the router and middleware. Total depreciation and delegation to a separate gem will happen pretty soon.
Instead you want to use a request spec.
RSpec.describe "API V1 Bathrooms", type: 'request' do
describe "POST /api/v1/bathrooms" do
context "with valid parameters" do
let(:valid_params) do
{
bathroom: {
establishment: "Fake Place",
address: "123 Main St",
city: "Cityton",
state: "NY",
zip: "11111",
gender: "Unisex",
key_needed: false,
toilet_quantity: 1
}
}
end
it "creates a new bathroom" do
expect { post "/api/v1/bathrooms", params: valid_params }.to change(Bathroom, :count).by(+1)
expect(response).to have_http_status :created
expect(response.headers['Location']).to eq api_v1_bathroom_url(Bathroom.last)
end
it "creates a bathroom with the correct attributes" do
post "/api/v1/bathrooms", params: valid_params
expect(Bathroom.last).to have_attributes valid_params[:bathroom]
end
end
context "with invalid parameters" do
# testing for validation failures is just as important!
# ...
end
end
end
Also sending a bunch of junk like render json: { status: 'SUCCESS', message: 'Saved new bathroom', bathrooms: bathroom }, status: :ok is an anti-pattern.
In response you should just send a 201 CREATED response with a location header which contains a url to the newly created resource or a response body that contains the newly created resource.
def create
bathroom = current_user.bathrooms.new(bathroom_params)
if bathroom.save
head :created, location: api_v1_bathroom_url(bathroom)
else
head :unprocessable_entity
end
end
If your client can't tell by looking at the response code if the response is successful or not you're doing it wrong.

Answer 2

You don't really need to test the values from the record saved on the database, you could do something like:
expect(post :create, params: params).to change(Bathroom, :count).by(1)
That's enough to test that the create action creates a record on the desired table.
Then you can add more specs to test that Bathroom.new receives the expected parameters (that way you know that it would have those fields when saved), or stub the bathroom object and it's save method to test the response.
If you want to test that the saved record has the right values, I think that spec belongs to the Bathroom model and not the controller (or better, an integration test).

Answer 3

So I followed the advice of max but made one slight change to get it working. My final code was:
RSpec.describe "API V1 Bathrooms", type: 'request' do
describe "POST /api/v1/bathrooms" do
context "with valid parameters" do
let(:valid_params) do
{
bathroom: {
establishment: "Fake Place",
address: "123 Main St",
city: "Cityton",
state: "NY",
zip: "11111",
gender: "Unisex",
key_needed: false,
toilet_quantity: 1
}
}
end
it "creates a new bathroom" do
user = FactoryGirl.create(:user, email: "email1#website.com")
login_as(user, :scope => :user)
expect { post "/api/v1/bathrooms", params: valid_params }.to change(Bathroom, :count).by(+1)
expect(response).to have_http_status :created
expect(response.headers['Location']).to eq api_v1_bathroom_url(Bathroom.last)
end
it "creates a bathroom with the correct attributes" do
user = FactoryGirl.create(:user, email: "email2#website.com")
login_as(user, :scope => :user)
post "/api/v1/bathrooms", params: valid_params
expect(Bathroom.last).to have_attributes valid_params[:bathroom]
end
end
end
end
The key was to use FactoryGirl to create a new user because the bathroom needs an associated user_id to be valid.