Disabling tests in Shoulda

I'm using Shoulda on a client project, although I prefer rspec myself.

One of the things I miss from rspec is the ability to turn off a test, temporarily, by changing;


it "should do something"


...to;


xit "should do something"


Tests which are disabled in this way show up as "Example disabled: it should do something", when the specs are executed.

Using this with autotest and a couple of quick vim macros, my workflow goes something like this;

1. See that there is a failure in a particular test
2. Position the cursor in that test and hit ",ofs" this triggers my macro to disable all specs except the current one, and save the file so that autotest runs it again.
3. Hack, hack, hack to fix the bug, or develop the feature that the failing test relates to.
4. Hit ",ons" to turn all the specs back on and save the file again.

In Shoulda, renaming a test from;


should "do something"


...to;


xshould "do something"


Gives you a nice NoMethodError.

But, this is ruby, so we just add this to our test/test_helper.rb




class ActiveSupport::TestCase
  def self.xshould(name, &block)
    puts "disabled test: #{name}"
  end
end




Now, we get pretty much the same behaviour as with 'xit' in rspec.

For any vim users in the audience, here are the macros (actually, abbreviations) I use to turn tests, specs and shouldas on and off. Just add to your .gvimrc (or .vimrc) file;


"rspec
map ,ofs :%s/ it / xit ''?xitx:w
map ,ons :%s/ xit / it /'':w

"shoulda
map ,ofh :%s/ should / xshould ''?xshouldx:w
map ,onh :%s/ xshould / should /'':w

"test/unit
map ,oft :%s/def test/def xtest''?xtestx:w
map ,ont :%s/def xtest/def test/'':w