DB transactions w/ RSpec

Testing RSpec
1

Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere, Google was not very helpful
to me on this one. If I’m running a model spec and am one of those
benighted souls who wants to hit the DB while doing so, is there a way
for me to tell RSpec to skip transactions? In Test::Unit I can say
“uses_transaction :test_should_do_something”, but am not sure what the
analogous thing would be in RSpec.

Thanks in advance,
Francis

2

As far as I can tell, RSpec simply uses inherited TestCase capabilities
for
transactions, including use_transactional_fixtures (it’s config setting
is
simply passed on) and likely uses_transaction.

I’m guessing you can do something like:

uses_transaction :create
it "should save message" do
    ...
end

At least it gives no exception for me.

The TestCase logic is pretty simple- it skips transactional fixtures if
the
method is in it’s array, so I imagine it works.

If not, this shoulda ticket talks about the same need, with a patch that
integrates it into shoulda contexts. That might give some clues.
https://thoughtbot.lighthouseapp.com/projects/5807-shoulda/tickets/97

BTW- I happened to be watching your RubyConf2008 Testing Heresies talk
yesterday. Good talk.

Regards,
Nick

3

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Nicholas Van W.
[email protected] wrote:

At least it gives no exception for me.
The TestCase logic is pretty simple- it skips transactional fixtures if the
method is in it’s array, so I imagine it works.
If not, this shoulda ticket talks about the same need, with a patch that
integrates it into shoulda contexts. That might give some clues.
https://thoughtbot.lighthouseapp.com/projects/5807-shoulda/tickets/97

Any thoughts on what uses_transaction wants as an argument? I can’t
help but feel like I’ve tried 10 combinations of ways to do this, and
there’s some 11th way that will be easy but I haven’t thought to try.

For context, my code doesn’t even use transactions; it’s using a 2nd
DB connection to a slave DB, which will be different in some envs and
not others. This seems to get tripped up by transactions since the
master connection makes a change to the DB and the slave connection
needs to see it right away. (Yes I know in production there are
latency issues, that’s acceptable in this case.)

BTW- I happened to be watching your RubyConf2008 Testing Heresies talk
yesterday. Good talk.

Thanks!

Francis

4

The rails code is pretty straightforward: def
uses_transaction(*methods)
@uses_transaction = [] unless defined?(@uses_transaction)
@uses_transaction.concat methods.map(&:to_s)
end

  def uses_transaction?(method)
    @uses_transaction = [] unless defined?(@uses_transaction)
    @uses_transaction.include?(method.to_s)
  end
end

def run_in_transaction?
  use_transactional_fixtures &&
    !self.class.uses_transaction?(method_name)
end

Works for me in my tests.

uses_transaction “it should do this”
it “should do this” do
puts “runs in transaction=#{self.run_in_transaction?}”
end

runs as expected, providing false when the uses_transaction is set, and
true
otherwise (assuming config.use_transactional_fixtures = true).

Regards,
Nick

5

Yeah, that worked for me, thanks. And for whatever reason nesting was
part of the problem, but if I put it all in one top-level describe
with the examples below it worked fine.

FH

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 2:42 PM, Nicholas Van W.