Remarkable ActiveRecord

Remarkable ActiveRecord is a collection of matchers to ActiveRecord. Why use Remarkable?

  • Matchers for all ActiveRecord validations, with support to all options. The only exceptions are validate_format_of (which should be invoked as allow_values_for) and the :on option;

  • Matchers for all ActiveRecord associations. The only one which supports all these options:

    :through, :source, :source_type, :class_name, :foreign_key, :dependent,
:join_table, :uniq, :readonly, :validate, :autosave, :counter_cache, :polymorphic

    Plus SQL options:

    :select, :conditions, :include, :group, :having, :order, :limit, :offset

    Besides in Remarkable 3.0 matchers became much smarter. Whenever :join_table or :through is given as option, it checks if the given table exists. Whenever :foreign_key or :counter_cache is given, it checks if the given column exists;

  • Tests and more tests. We have a huge tests suite ready to run and tested in ActiveRecord 2.1.2, 2.2.2 and 2.3.2;

  • Great documentation;

  • I18n.

Examples

All Remarkable macros can be accessed in two different ways. For those who prefer the Shoulda style, let’s look at some model tests:

describe Post do
  should_belong_to :user
  should_have_many :comments
  should_have_and_belong_to_many :tags

  should_validate_presence_of :body
  should_validate_presence_of :title
  should_validate_uniqueness_of :title, :allow_blank => true
end

For those who likes more the Rspec way can simply do:

describe Post do
  it { should belong_to(:user) }
  it { should have_many(:comments) }
  it { should have_and_belong_to_many(:tags) }

  it { should validate_presence_of(:body) }
  it { should validate_presence_of(:title) }
  it { should validate_uniqueness_of(:title, :allow_blank => true) }
end

I18n

All matchers come with I18n support. If you want to translate your matchers, grab make a copy of locale/en.yml and start to translate it.

Then add your new locale file to Remarkable:

Remarkable.add_locale 'path/to/my_locale.yml'

And then:

Remarkable.locale = :my_locale

Using it outside Rails

If you want to use Remarkable ActiveRecord outside Rails, you have to remember a few things:

1. Internationalization is powered by the I18n gem. If you are using it with Rails,
   it will use the built in gem, otherwise you will have to install the gem by hand:

      gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
      sudo gem install svenfuchs-i18n

2. Include the matchers. Remarkable Rails gem is the responsable to add
   ActiveRecord matchers to rspec. If you are not using it, you have to do:

      Remarkable.include_matchers!(Remarkable::ActiveRecord, Spec::Example::ExampleGroup)

   This will make ActiveRecord matchers available in all rspec example groups.