So unit testing isn’t really in activesupport. Ruby comes with a typical xunit framework in the standard libs (Test::Unit in ruby 1.8.x, MiniTest in ruby 1.9), and the stuff in activesupport just adds some stuff to it.
If you are using Test::Unit/MiniTest
assert_raise(Exception) { whatever.merge }
if you are using rspec (unfortunately poorly documented, but way more popular)
lambda { whatever.merge }.should raise_error
If you want to check the raised Exception
:
exception = assert_raises(Exception) { whatever.merge }
assert_equal( "message", exception.message )