How to declare a variable shared between examples in RSpec?

Question

Suppose I have the following spec:

...
describe Thing do

  it \'can read data\' do
     @data = get_data_from_file  # [ \'42\', \'36\' ]
     expect(@data.count         


        

Answer 1

I just ran into this same problem. How I solved it was by using factory_girl gem.

Here's the basics:

create a factory (here's a code snippet:

require 'factory_girl'
require 'faker' # you can use faker, if you want to use the factory to generate fake data

FactoryGirl.define do
  factory :generate_data, class: MyModule::MyClass do
    key 'value'
  end
end

Now after you made the factory you need to make a Model that looks like this:

Module MyModule
  class MyClass
    attr_accessor :key

    #you can also place methods here to call from your spec test, if you wish
    # def self.test
        #some test
    # end
  end
end

Now going back to your example you can do something like this:

describe Thing do
  before(:all) do
  @data = FactoryGirl.build(:generate_data)
  end

  it 'can read data' do
     @data.key = get_data_from_file  # [ '42', '36' ]
     expect(@data.key.count).to eq 2
  end

  it 'can process data' do
     expect(@data.key[0].to_i).to eq 42  # @data will not be nil. at this point. whatever @data.key is equal to last which was set in your previous context will be what data.key is here
  end

end

Anyways, good luck let us know, if you got some other solution!