---
title: "Shoulda Macros with Blocks"
date: 2009-04-29T00:00:00+00:00
draft: false
canonical_url: https://www.viget.com/articles/shoulda-macros-with-blocks/
---

When I'm not working on client projects, I keep myself busy
with [SpeakerRate](http://speakerrate.com), a site that lets conference
goers rate the talks they've attended. After a number of similar
suggestions from users, we decided to display the total number of
ratings alongside the averages. Although only talks can be rated,
speakers, events and series also have ratings through their associated
talks. As you can imagine, calculating the total ratings for each of
these required a lot of somewhat repetitive code in the models, and
*very* repetitive code in the associated tests.

Fortunately, since we're using
[Shoulda](http://thoughtbot.com/projects/shoulda/), we were able to DRY
things up considerably with a macro:

```ruby
class Test::Unit::TestCase
  def self.should_sum_total_ratings
    klass = model_class

    context "finding total ratings" do
      setup do
        @ratable = Factory(klass.to_s.downcase)
      end

      should "have zero total ratings if no rated talks" do
        assert_equal 0, @ratable.total_ratings
      end

      should "have one total rating if one delivery & content rating" do
        talk = block_given? ? yield(@ratable) : @ratable
        Factory(:content_rating, :talk => talk)
        Factory(:delivery_rating, :talk => talk)

        assert_equal 1, @ratable.reload.total_ratings
      end
    end
  end
end
```

This way, if we're testing a talk, we can just say:

```ruby
class TalkTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  context "A Talk" do
    should_sum_total_ratings
  end
end
```

But if we're testing something that has a relationship with multiple
talks, our macro accepts a block that serves as a factory to create a
talk with the appropriate relationship. For events, we can do something
like:

```ruby
class EventTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  context "An Event" do
    should_sum_total_ratings do |event|
      Factory(:talk, :event => event)
    end
  end
end
```

I'm pretty happy with this solution, but having to type "event" three
times still seems a little verbose. If you've got any suggestions for
refactoring, let us know in the comments.
