How to access a controller method from a Cucumber test - or alternatives?

Question

I have an application that has a User model, and users have different roles. The roles are represented internally as integer indexes, but are presented to the user as strings. I also have a helper function access_level (in application_controller.rb - is that a sensible place for it?) that takes either the integer index or the string representation and returns a hash of loads of information about the role (including the string representation and the index, so this is a convenient way of converting between them). In case it matters, access_level depends in turn on role definitions defined in a file in config\initializers.

Because the interface presented to the user depends on the role, my tests have lots of things like Given I have the role of administrator and such like. I'm trying to create the user with FactoryGirl.create(:user, role: access_level(role).index) but I can't get Cucumber to see access_level.

Most of the advice I find by Googling this says "don't do that" because calling functions behind the scenes violates the principle of keeping Cucumber at the UI level, but I can't see a way of testing this user behaviour without Cucumber knowing how to map role names to indexes. I could duplicate access_level in one of my Cucumber support files, of course, but that violates DRY. So how should I structure this in such a way as to be able to test it cleanly in Cucumber?

Dave Schweisguth Dave Schweisguth · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-03T02:58:38

Cucumber drivers simulate a browser, so step definitions don't have an instance of a controller or access to controller instance methods.

The simplest possible way to make that controller method available to Cucumber step definitions would be to make it a class method and call it with ApplicationController.access_level. That would be icky, however, since it would make the step definitions depend on a class that they shouldn't know about.

Instead, put the code that you want to use in both your app and in Cucumber step definitions into a module and include that module in ApplicationController and in the Cucumber world.

In app/models/access_control.rb:

module AccessControl
  def access_level(role)
    # do whatever is necessary
  end
end

(I guessed that it should be in the models directory because it feels like a model-level concern to me, but that's not critical.)

In app/controllers/application_controller.rb:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  include AccessControl
  # ...
end

In features/support/env.rb:

World AccessControl

How to access a controller method from a Cucumber test - or alternatives?

2 Answers