My pair and I spent today upgrading one of our apps to Rails 2.2, as a sort of trial run for eventually upgrading all our apps. This involved the usual amount of concomitant upgrades to plugins, with no shortage of "great, this is broken...now something else is broken...not that too!" hijinks. The best part of the day, though, was the RSpec tests that kept failing no matter what we tried to throw at them.
Long story short, we have a controller that uses a
rescue_from
handler to redirect in the event of a connection error. Works like a charm when we're clicking through the app. But after upgrading RSpec and RSpec-Rails it simply refused to pass the specs that verified the redirect behavior.It turns out that the latest version of RSpec has some secret sauce that defeats
rescue_from
, instead going directly to raising the exception that needed rescuing from in the first place. I guess I wouldn't mind so much if we didn't have several behavior-driven tests that, you know, tested behavior.Not too cool, Rudy.
There is, of course, a workaround. Simply add
controller.use_rails_error_handling!
to your test and you can defeat RSpec's defeating of rescue_from
. But, just as double negatives fail to not clutter English prose (see what I did there?), having to demand that RSpec get out of the way of Rails' standard and -- in this case -- reasonable behavior just uglies up my code. I would much rather the maintainers of RSpec had elected to make the ability to bypass the rescue handler and skip straight to the underlying exception an "opt-in" behavior.