unable to find link in rspec

Question

Here is part of my rspec code in spec/controllers/movies_controller_spec.rb:

it 'should call a controller method to receive the click on
"Find With Same Director", and grab the id of the subject' do     
  Movie.stub('find_similar_movies')
  controller.should_receive('similar_movies').
          with(hash_including :id => '3')
  visit movie_path('3')
  click_link('Find Movies With Same Director')
end

and I always get the error:

Failure/Error: click_link('Find Movies With Same Director')
     Capybara::ElementNotFound:
       Unable to find link "Find Movies With Same Director"

Here is part of my view in app/views/movies/show.html.haml:

%h2 Details about #{@movie.title}

%ul#details
  %li
    Rating:
    = @movie.rating
  %li
    Director:
    = @movie.director
  %li
    Released on:
    = @movie.release_date.strftime("%B %d, %Y")

%h3 Description:

%p#description= @movie.description

= link_to 'Edit', edit_movie_path(@movie)
= button_to 'Delete', movie_path(@movie), :method => :delete, :confirm => 'Are you sure?' 
= link_to 'Back to movie list', movies_path
= link_to 'Find Movies With Same Director', similar_movies_path(@movie)

I also run the cucumber with the same step: visit the same page, and click the link, it passed. But in the rspec, I failed the test.

Answer 1

By default, views are not rendered in RSpec controller tests, so your Capybara find_link method is looking through emptiness and cannot succeed.

You can "turn on" view rendering for an example group by including a call to render_views at the top of the describe block as discussed in https://www.relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-rails/docs/controller-specs/render-views

However, controllers are intended to be tested with other mechanisms, as discussed in https://www.relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-rails/docs/controller-specs

See also How do I test whether my controller rendered the right layout on Rails 3?.