Testing Prawn PDF generation using Rspec

I was recently pleased to discover how easy it was to test a PDF generation service built on top of Prawn in a Rails app.

First I added the pdf-inspector gem to Gemfile:

gem 'pdf-inspector', require: "pdf/inspector", group: :test

Next, a spec:

require 'spec_helper'

describe 'book_pdf' do
    before do
        @book = FactoryGirl.build_stubbed(:book).decorate
        view_context = ActionController::Base.new.view_context
        pdf = BookPdf.new(@book, view_context)
        rendered_pdf = pdf.render
        @text_analysis = PDF::Inspector::Text.analyze(rendered_pdf)
    end

    specify { @text_analysis.strings.should include(@book.title) }

end

https://github.com/prawnpdf/pdf-inspector

That’s it! Great testing tool.

I am available for Ruby on Rails consulting work – get in touch to learn more.

May 9, 2014

Testing Prawn PDF generation using Rspec