Odd behavior of example metadata

[br...@targetedvictory.com]

Consider this (simplified) snippet. RSpec 3.1.7

RSpec.describe MyController, :type => :controller do

  describe "PUT #update" do

    before(:example) do
      puts self.class                          #=> RSpec::ExampleGroups::MyController::PUTUpdate
      puts self.class.example.description      #=> "example at ./spec/controllers/my_controller_spec.rb:xxx"
      puts self.class.example.full_description #=> "MyController PUT update"
      puts example.description                 #=> undefined local variable or method 'example'

    end


    it "should update things" do
      puts self.class                          #=> RSpec::ExampleGroups::MyController::PUTUpdate
      puts self.class.example.description      #=> "example at ./spec/controllers/my_controller_spec.rb:xxx"
      puts self.class.example.full_description #=> "MyController PUT update"
      puts example.description                 #=> undefined local variable or method 'example'
    end
  end
end

I'm seeing some odd results when getting the metadata and description values for examples. 

None of the Example instance methods work. Everything behaves as an ExampleGroup. I'm not sure if this is intended.

From the rspec-core README https://github.com/rspec/rspec-core#metadata

it "does something" do
  expect(example.metadata[:description]).to eq("does something")
end

This does not work. Am I doing something wrong?

[Myron Marston]

Our README is out of date -- it was written against RSpec 2 but we have no tooling that validates its correctness and we forgot to update that example for the changes in RSpec 3.  That's one advantage of the cukes -- they are self-validating and thus always correct :).

Anyhow, in RSpec 3, we removed the `example` method, in favor of passing an arg to the `it`, `before`, `after`, `let`, etc. blocks:

http://rspec.info/blog/2014/05/notable-changes-in-rspec-3/#dsl-methods-yield-the-example-as-an-argument

So change `before(:example) do` to `before(:example) do |example|` and `it "..." do` to `it "..." do |example|` and it should work.

Everything behaves as an ExampleGroup. I'm not sure if this is intended.

It is.  Every example is evaluated in the context of an instance of the example group class of which it is a part.  This mirrors typical xUnit structure where you've got TestCase classes and tests are instance methods of those classes.  This in turn provides us with the desired scoping and inheritance semantics that you'd want.  Helper methods defined in the example group can be automatically called from within the `it` block without doing anything special to support that.

The `example` object yielded to these methods is a special object that keeps track of the state of a particular example, exposing its metadata, its execution result, etc.

HTH,

Myron

[Myron Marston]

One other thing that's probably confusing there: when you call `self.class.example` you are defining a new example.  `it` is simply an alias of `example`.  That's why `self.class.example.description` has the location rather than the description of the `it` example -- because you're getting the description off of a new, anonymous example, so it is using the location description as the example description.

Myron 

[br...@targetedvictory.com]

Got it. Works as expected. Thanks! 

[Myron Marston]

Want to open a PR fixing our README :)?

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[Besnik Ruka]

I'll leave it for someone more familiar with functionality/best practices.

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