I am having trouble testing my controller's update action using Rspec, what am I doing wrong?

I am trying to test the failing branch of the update action on my controller but I am having trouble with the test. This is 开发者_运维问答what I have and it fails on the last

describe "PUT 'article/:id'" do
.
.
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  describe "with invalid params" do
    it "should find the article and return the object" do
      Article.stub(:find).with("1").and_return(@article)
    end

    it "should update the article with new attributes" do
      Article.stub(:update_attributes).and_return(false)
    end

    it "should render the edit form" do
      response.should render_template("edit")
    end
  end
end

Any ideas as to why the last part fails to render the template?

You're splitting up the parts of your test incorrectly. Each it call is actually a new example and the state is reset before/after each one.

What you should be doing is:

describe "with invalid params" do
  before do
    @article = Article.create(valid_params_go_here)
  end

  it "should find the article and return the object" do
    put :update, { :id => @article.id, :article => { :title => "" } }
    response.should render_template("edit")
  end
end

By doing it this way, the @article is set up before hand (although you could use a mock one if you really wanted to) and the request to the update action and the assertion that it actually renders the edit template all happen in the one example.

For people who are coming here in 2018, some updates(pun not intended) have been made. It's important to include "params" before listing the params. Additionally, you should use expect and not "should" since it will be deprecated in Rails 6.0.

describe "with invalid params" do
  before(:each) do
    @article = Article.create(valid_params_go_here)
  end

describe "PATCH update/:id" do
  it "should find the article and return the object" do
    put :update, params: { id: @article.id, article: { title: "" } }
    expect(response).to be_redirect
  end
end