Missing fixtures declarations cause test failures

November 14th, 2006

Bob Silva posted Testing Gotchas in Rails in mid-October. I had fallen across this error myself a few times.

Well, today I had a huge code base I needed to check. I wrote the following Rake task:

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# Find missing fixtures declarations from Rails tests
# Code by Francois Beausoleil (francois@teksol.info)
# Released in the public domain.  Do as you wish.
desc "Finds missing fixtures declarations from your tests"
task :find_missing_fixtures do
  state = :find_test_case
  test_case = nil

  Dir['test/*/*_test.rb'].each do |file|
    File.open(file, 'r') do |f|
      f.each do |line|
        case state
        when :find_fixture
          case line
          when /def test_/
            printf "%s: %s\n", file, test_case
            state = :find_test_case
          when /fixtures/
            state = :find_test_case
          when /class (\w+) < Test::Unit::TestCase$/
            test_case = $1
            state = :find_test_case
          end

        when :find_test_case
          case line
          when /class (\w+) < Test::Unit::TestCase$/
            test_case = $1
            state = :find_fixture
          end
        end
      end
    end
  end
end
Run it like this: 
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$ rake find_missing_fixtures
(in D:/wwwroot/wpul.staging.teksol.info)
test/unit/name_test.rb: NameTest
test/unit/application_helper_test.rb: ApplicationHelperTest
test/unit/application_helper_test.rb: ApplicationHelperTruncationTest

Why do I report both the file and TestCase name ? Because I put more than one TestCase per test file, as I reported in Test fixtures and behavioral testing

Of course, if I could do away with fixtures altogether…

  • 2 comments

Test fixtures and behavioral testing

January 25th, 2006

Yesterday, I was coding a new set of tests for a Picture class. I wanted to introduce an on-disk cache, when the picture is public.

I already had an existing test/unit/picture_test.rb, which I extended.

The tests looked like this: 
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class PictureTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  def test_picture_exists_on_disk
    pict = uploaded_file('large.jpg', 'image/jpeg', 'somepicture.jpg')
    @picture = Picture.build(pict)
    @picture.public = true
    assert_model_saved @picture

    assert File.exist?(@picture.cache_filename), 'file copied to disk'
  end

  def test_thumbnail_exists_on_disk
    pict = uploaded_file('large.jpg', 'image/jpeg', 'somepicture.jpg')
    @picture = Picture.build(pict)
    @picture.public = true
    assert_model_saved @picture

    assert File.exist?(@picture.cache_thumbnail), 'file copied to disk'
  end
end

I knew this was the wrong way to go – the fixture was repeated more than once. Then, I realized that what I wanted was a new TestCase. I had already reached for my mouse to hit New File when I had a flash: what prevents me from simply adding a new class to picture_test.rb ?

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class PictureTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  def test_read_from_stringio
    ...
  end
end

class PublicPictureTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  def setup
    pict = uploaded_file('large.jpg', 'image/jpeg', 'somepicture.jpg')
    @picture = Picture.build(pict)
    @picture.public = true
    assert_model_saved @picture
  end

  def test_picture_exists_on_disk
    assert File.exist?(@picture.cache_filename), 'file copied to disk'
  end

  def test_thumbnail_exists_on_disk
    assert File.exist?(@picture.cache_thumbnail), 'thumbnail copied to disk'
  end
end

class PrivatePictureTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  include PicturePathHelper

  def setup
    pict = uploaded_file('large.jpg', 'image/jpeg', 'somepicture.jpg')
    @picture = Picture.build(pict)
    @picture.public = false
    assert_model_saved @picture
  end

  def test_picture_not_copied_to_disk_when_private
    assert !File.exist?(@picture.cache_filename),
        'image should not be on disk when picture is private'
  end

  def test_thumbnail_not_copied_to_disk_when_private
    assert !File.exist?(@picture.cache_thumbnail),
        'thumbnail should not be on disk when picture is private'
  end
end

I also had another flash: is TestCase the right name ? Shouldn’t it be called TestFixture instead ? Because that is what instances of this class represent – a test fixture.

This is very much akin to Spec::Context, from RSpec.

And you see the tests ? They all respect the one assertion per test. I was quite happy with the results.

Now, I need to refactor those other instances in my test suite…

  • 0 comments

Named Test Fixtures

October 18th, 2005

In one of my projects, I have tons of units and functional tests. To speed things up, I set my configuration like this: 

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class Test::Unit::TestCase
  self.use_transactional_fixtures = true
  self.use_instantiated_fixtures  = :no_instances
end
In my tests, instead of accessing @bob, I now have to do: 
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def test_party_is_destoryed
  party = Party.find(@parties['bob']['id'])
  party.destroy
  assert party.destroyed?, "Party wasn't marked destroyed"
end
Works, but isn’t this very verbose ? So, I created myself a little helper:: 
def party(fixture_name)
  Party.find(@parties[fixture_name.to_s]['id'])
end
All great and dandy. I wanted to share with the community, so I started digging into fixtures.rb to implement it. Much to my surprise, this already exists: 
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class Test::Unit::TestCase #:nodoc:
  def self.fixtures(*table_names)
    table_names = table_names.flatten
    self.fixture_table_names |= table_names
    require_fixture_classes(table_names)
    setup_fixture_accessors(table_names)
  end
end

So, I guess I’m going to send a documentation patch instead of code !

UPDATE 1 (Oct 18, 2005): Well, would you look at that, this is all documented in the Class: Fixtures (See the last paragraph under Using Fixtures)

UPDATE 2 (Oct 25, 2005): Rails 0.14.1 is pre-configured like that. In fact, Mike Clark wrote Faster Testing with Rails 1.0 to explain the new behavior.

  • 0 comments

 

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I am François Beausoleil, a Ruby on Rails coder. During the day, I work on XLsuite. At night, I am interested many things. Read my biography

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