[rspec-devel] running only a select group of specs

[Ben Mabey]

Hi all,
I've started to use the nullDB adapter quite a bit on one of my rails
app's spec suite.  In fact, I have it as my default adapter and only
turn the real DB adapter on when I have a spec that absolutely requires
it.  I call these functional specs and I include my Functional module:
    share_as :Functional do

      before :all do
        ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(:test)
      end
    
      after :all do
        ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(:adapter => :nulldb)
      end
    end


With that said, I am now finding myself wanting to run my unit and
functional specs separately at times... So I would like to be able to do:
rake spec # run all
rake spec:unit
rake spec:functional

I know the easy thing would be to just create separate unit and
functional directories.. but that is something that I would like to
avoid.  Besides, that is easy and I like pain. :)

So... what would be a good way to accomplish this?

I thought that if I somehow tagged my specs I could run them
conditionally.  So I modified my version of rspec so that I can get
access to my example group options.. meaning, I can now say:
  describe "some thing", :functional => true do
    ...
  end

And in my spec_helper I have:

config.before(:all) do
    if example_group_options[:functional]
     ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(:test)
    end
  end

  config.after(:all) do
   if example_group_options[:functional]
     ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(:adapter => :nulldb)
   end
  end

Now that I have essentially tagged my specs, is there an easy way I
could modify the runner to only run certain specs?
Maybe easy isn't a good word... is there a clean way to do this?

Thanks in advance for any input,

Ben