When I’m getting back into a project after not working on it for a while, I just want to know whether the application works. I want to know whether it will run on my development environment, even if I’m on a new machine. I have three computers that I use at various locations so this is important to me.

So for me the simplest possible test would be:

• The home page should load. That is the default route should return a successful page without any errors. It will have some key piece of text that says it’s working.

Here’s how I do it with cucumber:

If you haven’t installed the cucumber gems yet, put this in your config/test.rbfile.

If you haven’t cucumber set up yet, run

script/generate cucumber

Then, create the file below:

File: features/homepage.feature

Feature: View homepage for app
  In order to make sure the app loads
  As a user
  I want to see the home page

Scenario: Homepage should say Search
  When I go to the homepage
  Then I should see "Search"

Tip: none of what you write in the Feature section really matters. It’s just for you or your client’s benefit.

Then, run

cucumber features

You should get the following output:

:> cucumber features
Feature: View homepage for app
  In order to make sure the app loads
  As a user
  I want to see the home page

  Scenario: Homepage should say Search # features/homepage.feature:6
    When I go to the homepage          # features/step_definitions/webrat_steps.rb:10
    Then I should see "My Telltale Text" # features/step_definitions/webrat_steps.rb:118

1 scenario (1 passed)
2 steps (2 passed)

Some cool things about this: “the homepage” is something that cucumber / webrat understands out of the box. See features/step_definitions/webrat_steps.rb for how to define other custom route names. And also, “I should see “something in quotes” is out of the box cucumber goodness.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A little dated if you’re using a framework like Ruby on Rails, but definitely worth reviewing and further study. Lots of great practices. I feel like this book gives you the foundational understanding to what inspired many current Ruby on Rails practices.

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If you get a render with invalid options error, the solution is to uninstall the textmate footnotes plugin, and use the rails-footnotes plugin instead.

Thanks to David Zohrob’s blog post for helping me figure this out.

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The new website system for Sustainable Websites, built in Ruby on Rails, has articles (called posts in WordPress) and pages. I wanted the page not found (HTTP status 404) page to automatically direct them to the appropriate page, if it exists, or article, and if it doesn’t exist, provide some suggested links and a search box (pre-filled with some keywords from the URL they tried).

The initial part of this was based on Recipe 7 (page 43) of:“Advanced Rails Recipes: 84 New Ways to Build Stunning Rails Apps (Pragmatic Programmers)” (Mike Clark)

The first part was setting up a default route in routes.rb:

# 404 handler
map.connect '*path', :controller => 'four_oh_fours'

then here’s the 404 controller:

class FourOhFoursController < ApplicationController
   def index
   #clean the slash out of request.path.
   cleaned_path = request.path.gsub(/\//," ").strip
   #if request.path is in the set of page permalinks then redirect to that page
   to_page = Page.find_by_permalink(cleaned_path)
   if to_page then
     redirect_to page_permalink_url(to_page.permalink) and return false
   end
   #same if it is an article name
   to_article = Article.find_by_permalink(cleaned_path)
   if to_article then
     redirect_to permalink_url(to_article.permalink) and return false
   end

   #TODO: same if it a username?

   FourOhFour.add_request(request.host, request.path, request.env['HTTP_REFERER'] || '')
   respond_to do |format|
     format.html { render :file => "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/404.html", :status => "404 Not Found" }
     format.all { render :nothing => true, :status => "404 Not Found" }
   end
   end
end

It uses the Page model's find_by_permalink method but I could have easily just used find by title or another attribute of Pages.