[rspec-users] Cucumber - step negating another expecting step

[Matt Wynne]

On 16 Apr 2009, at 11:22, Joaquin Rivera Padron wrote:

> at the moment I do it this way, hiding the complexity out of the  
> steps:
>
> Then /^I should see the people search form$/ do
>   people_search_form_exists
> end
>
> Then /^I should not see the people search form$/ do
>   people_search_form_exists "not"
> end
>
> and then the method:
>
> def people_search_form_exists negation = ""
>   neg = "_not" unless negation.blank?
>   response.send "should#{neg}".to_sym, have_tag('form#frmSearch')
> end
>
> this is a simple case, but what do you think about this? any blog  
> post or so

Yeah this is an annoying one isn't it. I sometimes get around it by  
going old-skool and pulling out the Test::Unit assertion methods  
instead:

     Then /^I (should|should not) see the people search form$/ do | 
maybe|
       has_matching_tags = current_dom.css('form#frmSearch').length > 0
       assert has_matching_tags == (maybe == "should")
     end

I think that would work. It's shorter, but is it much easier to  
understand?

Matt Wynne
http://blog.mattwynne.net
http://www.songkick.com