How to make these RSpec tests more DRY in Rails

I have a bunch of recurring tests for some of my controller actions, all of which require authentication. As a result, you end up seeing a lot of code like the follo开发者_开发知识库wing:

  describe "authentication requests" do
    it "should return 401 for unauthenticated :show" do
      get :show
      ...
    end

    it "should return 401 for unauthenticated :create" do
      post :create
      ...
    end
  end

Is there a better way to DRY this code up so that any action in the controller that needs authentication can be described in one test?

If you need to replicate the tests across controllers, you can use rspec macros. Create a spec/macros/controller_macros.rb with a method like so:

def should_return_401_for_unauthenticated(test_controller)
  describe test_controller, "authentication requests" do
    it "should return 401 for show" do
      get :show
      response.code.should == "401"
    end
    it "should return 401 for create" do
      post :create
      response.code.should == "401"
    end
  end
end

Then in each controller spec that needs the tests:

describe MyController do
    should_return_401_for_unauthenticated(self)
end

I'm not an rspec user, but you could do something like:

describe "authentication requests" do

  limited_access = [:show, :create]

  limited_access.each do |action|
    it "should return 401 for unauthenticated :#{action}" do
      get action
      ## assert response 401
    end
  end

end

Or to just have one test:

describe "authentication requests" do

  limited_access = [:show, :create]

  it "should return 401 for unauthenticated #{limited_access.to_sentence}" do
    limited_access.each do |action|
      get action
      ## assert response 401
    end
  end

end

Could add a spec_helper method to abstract it for you ... The possibilities are endless.