# RSpec Steps
## ( or: why would I want to relearn how to write specs? )

RSpec Steps allows you to chain examples into a series of steps that run
in sequence and which stop when a step fails.  It's often incredibly 
useful to be able to aseemble a series of tests that should all pass, 
but where completely isolating them is less than sensible.

One excellent example is web site integration tests.  With RSpec steps you can 
do:

         steps "Login and change password" do
           it "should show the login form" do
             visit root
             page.should have_text "Login"
           end
        
           it "should successfully log in" do
             fill_in :name, "Johnny User"
             click "Login"
             page.should have_text "Welcome, Johnny!"
           end
           
           it "should load the password change form" do 
             click "My Settings"
             click "Update Password"
             page.should have_selector("form#update_password")
           end     
        
           it "should change the user's password successfully" do
             fill_in :password, "foobar"
             fill_in :password_confirmation, "foobar"
             click "Change Password"
             page.should have_text "Password changed successfully!"
             User.find_by_name("Johnny User").valid_password?("foobar").should be_true 
           end
        
         end

The examples above will be run in order.  State is preserved between examples
inside a "steps" block: any DB transactions will not roll back until the entire 
sequence has been complete. 

If any example inside the "steps" block fails, all remaining steps will be marked 
pending and therefore skipped. 

## Rationale

RSpec's philosophy is that all examples should be completely independent.  This
is a great philosophy for most purposes, and we recommend you stick to it in 
almost all cases.  BUT, that complete separation of examples really sucks when 
you're trying to write long stories involving many requests.   You are usually 
stuck with three choices:

1. Write a sequence of examples, each of which repeats the behavior of all previous examples. Downside: horrendously inefficient.
2. Write a single huge example which performs the entire story.  Downside: only one description, no independent reporting of the steps of the story.
3. Use Cucumber.  Downside: We agree totally with this guy: http://bit.ly/dmXqnY

RSpec-steps intentionally breaks RSpec's "independent" philosophy to let us get the
only thing we really want from Cucumber - the ability to execute some examples in sequence,
and skip subsequent steps after a failure.

## Caveats and cautions

Don't call "describe" inside of "steps".  The behavior is undefined and probably bad.  It's 
hard to imagine what this should actually mean in any case.  Future versions of rspec-steps 
will consider this an error.

Any call to "before" inside a steps block is treated like before(:all) and is run only
once before the first step.  Or perhaps more accurately, any call to before() is treated 
like before(:each) ... but for these purposes the entire steps block is treated like a 
single example.

## Advanced stuff:  shared steps

If you have (for example) two user stories that share the same first N steps but then
diverge, you can DRY your code out with shared_steps blocks, like so:

       shared_steps "For a logged-in user" do
         it "should have login form"
           visit root
           page.should have_selector "form#login"
         end

         it "should log the user in" do
           fill_in :name, "Johnny User"
           page.should have_text "Welcome, Johnny!"
         end
       end

       steps "updating password" do
         perform_steps "For a logged-in user" 
          
         it "should update the password" do
           ...
         end
       end

       steps "uploading a profile picture" do
         perform_steps "For a logged-in user"
       
         it "should upload a picture" do
            ...
         end
       end