Testing helpers in Rails 3 with Rspec 2 and Devise

Question

My helper code looks like this (and works fine btw):

module ProvidersHelper
  def call_to_review(provider)
    if user_signed_in? && review = Review.find_by_provider_id_and_user_id(provider.id, current_user.id)
      link_to "Edit Your Review", edit_provider_review_path(provider, review), :class => "call_to_review"
    else
      link_to "Review This Provider", new_provider_review_path(provider), :class => "call_to_review"
    end
  end
end

Unfortunately, this produces the following error when I run my tests:

 undefined method `user_signed_in?' for #<ActionView::Base:0x00000106314640>
 # ./app/helpers/providers_helper.rb:3:in `call_to_review'

Clearly the Devise::Controllers::Helpers are not being included in my helpers when rspec is running the test. Any suggestions that might help this work?

Edit: to provide a bit more information, my spec_helper does have this:

config.include Devise::TestHelpers, :type => :controller
config.include Devise::TestHelpers, :type => :view
config.include Devise::TestHelpers, :type => :helper

(Sadly, I couldn't get it to work with :type => [:controller, :view, :helper])

Anyway I believe that these lines add the sign_in(scope, object) (and other) test helpers to your tests. They don't add the helpers that you would actually leverage in your controller / view code.

Answer 1

I think the philosophy of rspec is to test the view/helpers/models in total isolation as much as possible. So in this case, i would stub out the user_signed_in? and returns false or true and my results should change appropriately. This gives you a clean isolated test.