Robot Has No Heart

Some changes went into rails 2.0.2 that mean the setup method in test subclasses won’t get called. Here’s how it went down:

• 8392 broke it
• 8430 tagged 2.0.2
• 8442 reverted 8392
• 8445 added a test so it doesn’t break again

You can see some code illustrating the problem in 8445. This affects two plugins that we’re using – helper_test and activemessaging.

For the helper test, the work around is to rename your helper test setup methods to setup_with_fixtures.

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def setup_with_fixtures
  super
end

For activemessaging, add the following line to the setup of your functionals that are failing (from the mailing list):

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ActiveMessaging.reload_activemessaging

I was working on creating functional tests for some of my code today, a task made ridiculously easy by rails. To add extra value, I added an assertion (from Scott Raymond) to validate my markup against the w3c online validator:

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def assert_valid_markup(markup=@response.body)
  if ENV["TEST_MARKUP"]
    require "net/http"
    response = Net::HTTP.start("validator.w3.org") do |w3c|
      query = "fragment=" + CGI.escape(markup) + "&output=xml"
      w3c.post2("/check", query)
    end
    assert_equal "Valid", response["x-w3c-validator-status"]
  end
end

The ENV test means it isn’t run by default since it slows down my tests considerably, but I don’t want to move markup checks out of the functional tests because that’s where they belong. Next step is to validate locally, which I’ve heard you can do with HTML Tidy.

Another problem is testing code that relies on DateTime.now, since this is a singleton call and not easily mockable.

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def pin_time
  time = DateTime.now
  DateTime.class_eval <<-EOS
    def self.now
      DateTime.parse("#{time}")
    end
  EOS
  yield time
end

# Usage
pin_time do |test_time|
  assert_equal test_time, DateTime.now
  sleep 2
  assert_equal test_time, DateTime.now
end

I haven’t found a neat way of resetting the behaviour of now. Using load 'date.rb' works but produces warnings for redefined constants. I couldn’t get either aliasing the original method, undefining the new one, or even just calling Date.now to work.

UPDATE: Ah, how young I was. A better way to do this is to use a library like mocha