Robot Has No Heart

Ideally you would want to include sphinx in your integration tests. It’s really just like your database. In practice, this is problematic. Ensuring the DB is started and triggering a re-index after each model load is doable, if slow, with a small bit of hacking of thinking sphinx (hint – change the initializer for the ThinkingSphinx::Configuration to allow you to specify the environment). Here’s the rub though – if you’re using transactional fixtures the sphinx indexer won’t be able to see any of your data! Turning that off can really slow down your tests, and once you add in the re-indexing time you’re going to be making a few cups of coffee while they run.

One approach I’ve been taking is to stub out the search methods with RR. I know, I know, stubbing in your integration tests is evil. I’m being pragmatic here. For most applications your search is trivial (find me results for this keyword), and if you unit test your define_index block you’re pretty well covered. To go one step further you could unit test your controllers with an expect on the search method, or have a separate suite of non-transactional integration tests running against sphinx. I like the latter, but haven’t done it yet.

Enough talk! Here’s the magic you need to get it working with cucumber:

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# features/steps/env.rb
require 'rr'
Cucumber::Rails::World.send(:include, RR::Adapters::RRMethods)

# features/steps/*_steps.rb
Given /a car with model '(\w+)' exists/ do |model|
  car = Car.create!(:model => model)
  stub(Car).search(model) { [car] }
end

flash.now has always been a pain to test. The the traditional rails approach is to use assert_select and find it in your views. This clearly doesn’t work if you want to test your controller in isolation.

Other folks have found work arounds to the problem, including mocking out the flash or monkey patching it.

These solutions feel a bit like using a sledgehammer to me. If you’re going to monkey patch/mock something, you want it to be as discreet as possible so to minimize the chance of the implementation changing underneath you and also to reduce the affect on other areas of your application. Also, why duplicate perfectly good code that is provided elsewhere?

The real problem with testing flash.now is that it gets cleaned up (via #sweep) at the end of the action before you get to test anything. So let’s solve that problem and that problem only: disable sweeping of flash.now:

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# spec/spec_helper.rb
module DisableFlashSweeping
  def sweep
  end
end

# A spec
describe BogusController, "handling GET to #index" do
  it "sets flash.now[:message]" do
    @controller.instance_eval { flash.extend(DisableFlashSweeping) }
    get :index
    flash.now[:message].should_not be_nil
  end
end

instance_eval is used to access the flash, since it’s a protected method, and we extend with the minimum possible code to do what we want – blanking out the sweep method. This should not cause problems because sweeping is only relevant across multiple requests, which we shouldn’t be doing in our controller specs.