Recently I've been working on a project that requires testing many actions that simply toggle an attribute. This is especially common with admin tasks. An example would be providing an admin with the ability to close or unclose a ticket.

There are quite a number of assert_difference test helpers floating around out there (see reference section at the bottom for links) which I've always found useful. Here is an offshoot to be used for these boolean actions:

assert_toggled

def assert_toggled(object, method, difference=true)
  initial_value = object.send(method)
  yield
  object.reload if object.respond_to? :reload
  assert_equal (difference ? !initial_value : initial_value), object.send(method)
end

def assert_not_toggled(object, method, &block)
  assert_toggled object, method, false, &block
end

Example usage

def test_close_as_admin
  login_as :admin
  assert_toggled(ticket, :closed?) do
    post :close, :id => ticket.id
  end
end

def test_close_as_non_admin
  login_as :normal_user
  assert_not_toggled(ticket, :closed?) do
    post :close, :id => ticket.id
  end
end

Reference

• http://project.ioni.st/post/218#post-218
• http://blog.caboo.se/articles/2006/06/13/a-better-assert_difference
• http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/6611
• http://topfunky.net/svn/plugins/topfunky_power_tools/lib/topfunky/test_helper.rb