Because sometimes you just need to assert that this appears before that on a page. Like when testing sort order.

For more explanation, derivation, and geekery, check out my original post on the LaunchWare Blog from last week!

The approach

There are many ways to do this, and I’ve tried lots of them in my work with LaunchWare. Most of them were ugly, clunky, brittle, or inefficient. Then I thought of a simple solution. Find the index (or position) of one piece of text (“this”) on the page and then find the index of the other (“that”) and assert like so:

page.body.index(this).should < page.body.index(that)

The gem

Simple enough right? So I made it into a custom rspec matcher, which I then gemified and web 2.0ified. It’s called orderly and it’s available at gem install orderly :) Also source code is on Github for your forking pleasure.

Now you can write:

this.appears_before(that)

And as a bonus, it’s got built in error handling if this or that aren’t found on the page. It’ll even tell you which one is missing.

Trust me, it’s fun. Soon you’ll be thinking you know what would make this app better? Putting things in a strict, complicated order so that we stack orderly assertions on assertions on assertions.