How do you test an AJAX request with RSpec/RoR?

Question

I\'m fairly new to RoR and recently started learning BDD/Rspec for testing my application. I\'ve been looking for a way to spec an AJAX request, but so far I haven\'t found

Answer 1

Rails 5 / 6

Since Rails 5.0 (with RSpec 3.X), try setting xhr: true like this:

get :index, xhr: true

Background

Here's the relevant code in the ActionController::TestCase. Setting the xhr flag ends up adding the following headers:

if xhr
  @request.set_header "HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH", "XMLHttpRequest"
  @request.fetch_header("HTTP_ACCEPT") do |k|
    @request.set_header k, [Mime[:js], Mime[:html], Mime[:xml], "text/xml", "*/*"].join(", ")
  end
end