These are notes mainly for me, so excuse the jumping around of topics in this post, I have been re-reading the book “Continuous Testing” by Ben Randy and Rod Coffin.

The Twitter gem used in the first example has changed quite a bit since the version used in the book, this was not a problem as a quick read of the documentation showed the way to achieve a similar result using the new API.

require 'twitter'

class User
  attr_accessor :twitter_username

  def last_five_tweets
    return Twitter.search("from:" + @twitter_username, :count => 5).map do |tweet|
      tweet[:text]
    end
  end
end

The line “Twitter.Search” should return 5 tweets from the user with the given user name.

The fun bit came when trying to mock the Twitter call as the original code was totally different, reading the ruby mocking documentation, I discovered that RSpec adds the mocking functions to every object in the application, not sure how this is achieved yet one of those magic bits of Ruby and its ability to extend classes on the fly, but it means that the test code for the above is very simple once the concept is understood.

 it "provides the last five tweets from Twitter" do
      tweets = [
          {:text => 'tweet1'},
          {:text => 'tweet2'},
          {:text => 'tweet3'},
          {:text => 'tweet4'},
          {:text => 'tweet5'},
      ]

      Twitter.should_receive(:search).with("from:logosity",:count=>5).and_return(tweets);

      @user.last_five_tweets.should == %w{tweet1 tweet2 tweet3 tweet4 tweet5}
    end

The line “Twitter.should_receive” is the setup for the mock “Twitter” being the object to be mocked and “search” the method that is expected to be called the “.with” is the arguments expected by the call, “and_return” defines what the mock should return for valid calls. 

Getting the auto test to run was as simple on my windows machine as in the book now we have the excellent rails installer which makes setting up Ruby and Rails on windows easier than any other environment, the first time I read this book, Bundler and “Jeweler” just wouldn’t work on windows at all and required a virtual machine, now everything simply just works, the only bit that caused problems was getting the auto test to call growl for windows to display the results in a nice popup display.

The documentation for “AutoTest Growl for Windows” slightly out of date and the suggested gem installs an older version which didn’t work on my machine throwing an error when autotest was run. 

After some digging around, I cloned this git repository for the growl auto-test project and got my Ruby Mine environment to build and deploy the gem for me, which has worked fine, a quick note growl auto-test sends failing tests messages as priority “Emergency”, and passing test messages as priority “Very Low” so setting the colours for these two priority settings gives the visor a helpful colour

Also in the root of the project, same place as the other configuration files like the gem file there needs to be a file called “.autotest” this must have the require for the growl auto-test gem

require 'autotest/growl'

now to carry on reading!