Professional Ruby on Rails™

1.6. Building a Recipe Editor

If you fire up the Rails server and look at the recipe input form, you'll see that at this point, it looks something like what is shown in Figure 1-1

Figure 1.1. Figure 1-1

While maintaining the proper amount of reverence to the tool that provided this form for free, it's easy to see that it won't do. Ingredients aren't listed, all the boxes are the wrong size, and basically the thing looks totally generic. Your punch list looks like this:

• Make the items that need longer data entry into text areas.

• Clean up the organization to look more like a finished recipe.

• Add ingredients to the recipe.

Naturally, you'll start by writing some tests.

1.6.1. Adding Ingredients

Test-Driven Development (TDD, sometimes also called Test-First Development) is a practice that first gained widespread attention as one of the core practices of Extreme Programming (or XP). Even if your programming is less extreme, writing automated tests is perhaps the best single way to ensure the quality and stability of your application over time. This is particularly true in Rails, because all kinds of testing goodness have been built into the framework, making powerful tests easy to write.

In this book, I'm going to try where possible to present working tests for the code samples as they are presented. The idea is to give you a sense of strategies for testing various parts of a Rails ...