RSpec::Rails (I'm using version 1.2.2 as of this writing) has a really cool feature to test view templates. This is one of the features where RSpec really has a leg up on standard Rails functional tests.

You can test the view templates without the controller actions running, which has the nice side-effect that your actions and your views become less tightly coupled—and you're doing BDD, right?

Here is an example of testing a layout, you can do this without even relating to an action or a view template:

  describe 'layouts/application' do

    before(:each) do