Shared Behaviours

Mocha currently has no concept of a “shared behaviour” however the “contexts” facilitate this feature. For example suppose you have an Admin which inherits from User, you most likely will not want to duplicate the User tests for Admin. The “context” (this) is the same object within the “before each”, “after each” hooks, and the test-case itself, allowing you to utilize this instead of closures to store data. The following is an example of how you can achieve this sort of functionality:

shared.js:

exports.shouldBehaveLikeAUser = function() {
  it('should have .name.first', function() {
    this.user.name.first.should.equal('tobi');
  })

  it('should have .name.last', function() {
    this.user.name.last.should.equal('holowaychuk');
  })

  describe('.fullname()', function() {
    it('should return the full name', function() {
      this.user.fullname().should.equal('tobi holowaychuk');
    })
  })
};

test.js:

var User = require('./user').User
  , Admin = require('./user').Admin
  , shared = require('./shared');

describe('User', function() {
  beforeEach(function() {
    this.user = new User('tobi', 'holowaychuk');
  })

  shared.shouldBehaveLikeAUser();
})

describe('Admin', function() {
  beforeEach(function() {
    this.user = new Admin('tobi', 'holowaychuk');
  })

  shared.shouldBehaveLikeAUser();

  it('should be an .admin', function() {
    this.user.admin.should.be.true;
  })
})

user.js:

exports.User = User;
exports.Admin = Admin;

function User(first, last) {
  this.name = {
    first: first,
    last: last
  };
}

User.prototype.fullname = function() {
  return this.name.first + ' ' + this.name.last;
};

function Admin(first, last) {
  User.call(this, first, last);
  this.admin = true;
}

Admin.prototype.__proto__ = User.prototype;