Peel me a Grape :: We make things work

Tony Byrne asks is Exator style acceptance testing useful for Ruby apps?

My short answer is – yes – from the successes I’ve seen using Exactor in enabling ‘business’ people to contribute directly to the Testing/Test Driven Development – simply by letting them work in an arena comfortable to them – eg text files/excel – not some complicated development environment. Maybe the value of getting ‘business’ people more involved in development alone can justify this approach?.

My long answer is – it depends. My personal preference – with Ruby is to stick with ruby for all my kinds of testing. But perhaps you are in a scenario where you have existing acceptance tests in Exactor for a Java project you want to port to Ruby?

Anyways, here’s a quick spike at implementing Exactor style testing in Ruby,

require 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri'

class Command
  attr_accessor :context
  def initialize(context)
    self.context = context
  end
end

class OpenWebPage < Command
  def run(url)
    context[:page] = Hpricot(open(url))
  end
end

class CheckTitle < Command
  def run(expected_title)
    raise "OOOOps" unless expected_title.eql?((context[:page]/"title").inner_html)
  end
end

test = File.read("test.txt")
context = {}
test.split("\n").each do |command_line|
  parts = command_line.split(" ")
  command = eval(parts.slice!(0)).send(:new, context)
  args = (parts.size == 1) ? parts[0] : parts
  command.run(args)
end

OpenWebPage http://www.google.com/
CheckTitle Google