I’ve played with cucumber and honestly it doesn’t work for me. It’s the complete opposite of DRY. It’s RYO ( repeat yourself often ). The thinking behind it is to get readable specs for your clients. However with a bit of refactoring you can make capybara rspec based integration tests look beautiful.

Here is a simple integration spec I wrote to test some tags functionality

require 'spec_helper'

describe "Tags" do

  before do
    @post1 = Factory.create :post, :tag_list => 'tag_a,tag_b,tag_c'
    @post2 = Factory.create :post, :tag_list => 'tag_a,tag_b'
    @post3 = Factory.create :post, :tag_list => 'tag_a'
  end

  include PostPageHelpers

  it "should show all articles when no tags are clicked" do

    visit posts_path

    within post_tags_section @post1 do
      page.should have_content "tag_a"
      page.should have_content "tag_b"
      page.should have_content "tag_c"
    end

    within post_tags_section @post2 do
      page.should have_content "tag_a"
      page.should have_content "tag_b"
      page.should_not have_content "tag_c"
    end

    within post_tags_section @post3 do
      page.should have_content "tag_a"
      page.should_not have_content "tag_b"
      page.should_not have_content "tag_c"
    end

  end


  it "should filter based on tags" do

    visit posts_path

    within post_tags_section(@post1) do
      click_on "tag_a"
    end

    page.should have_post @post1 
    page.should have_post @post2 
    page.should have_post @post3 

    within post_tags_section(@post1) do
      click_on "tag_b"
    end

    page.should have_post @post1 
    page.should have_post @post2 
    page.should_not have_post @post3 

    within post_tags_section(@post1) do
      click_on "tag_c"
    end

    page.should have_post @post1 
    page.should_not have_post @post2 
    page.should_not have_post @post3 
  end
end

The trick is to factor out the messy css selector garbage into helper methods with meaningful names. The implementation of the helper is below

module PostPageHelpers
  def have_post(post)
    have_css "section.post_#{post.id}"
  end

  def post_tags_section(post)
    "section.post_#{post.id} .tags"
  end
end