The perils in trusting syntax highlighting
14 Feb 2008Today after upgrading RSpec I ran a user story that I had just written and received a wonderful error: You have a nil object when you didn't expect it! (NoMethodError). The error occurred while evaluating nil.add_scenario. I didn’t even think to check my user story because the syntax highlighting looked fine and it made sense to me:
Scenario: areas have different types
As an administrator
I want to assign different types to the areas
So that I can structure the home page
Scenario: footer shows page links
Given an area
And area has 5 pages
And area is of type footer
When I view the home page
Then I should see the home page
And I should see the footer section
And the list section should contain 0 areas
And the footer section should contain 5 linksOf course, if I actually bothered to read it properly then I would have seen that the first line should have read:
Story: areas have different typesMoral of the story: even if the code that you have to write is small, always assume that you are capable of making silly mistakes!