Functional testing a has_many :through validation

Rails
1

The title of this post may be somewhat misleading; I am indeed UNIT
testing this, and it works fine, however I’m also functional testing a
POST to an action that is responsible for creating a new ActiveRecord
object that’s associated with the “parent” via has_many :through.

class Report < ActiveRecord::Base

…

has_many :report_notifiers
has_many :notifiers, :through => :report_notifiers

…

end

class ReportNotifier < ActiveRecord::Base

…

belongs_to :report

…

end

So, creating a new report with a new notifier would be simple:
@r = Report.new
@r.notifiers << Notifier.create(:label => “something”, :email =>
“[email protected]”)

But what happens when a user submits invalid e-mail address? Well, of
course, the validation fails. But how do I go about testing for the
presence of that validation failure message in my functional test?

Here’s my existing functional test:

def test_edit_with_invalid_notifiers
m = Factory(:maintenance_report) # I dig factory_girl, great
plugin

post :edit, {:m => m, :id => m.id, :notifiers => [1, 2, 3, '', 0,

‘asdfasf’, “\n\n;’;’’’’;UPDATE notifiers SET label=“hacked””],
:new_notifiers => “not a valid email!asdfasdfasf afd asdfasf 2
wgw@a asdf…\n\n\n\[email protected]”}

# ...now what?

end

As you can see, my test gives the controller action invalid data,
which will trigger an error when the validation is attempted. But,
given that the Notifier class, which contains the validation,
belongs_to the Report class, which is what I’m creating a new one of,
how do I test to see if we get any errors?

i.e. in a template I’d just have:
<%= errors_for :maintenance_report %>

…which would theoretically contain a bullet point saying something
about “invalid e-mail address”. But how do I test that?

2

You should be able to do an assert_select looking for whatever the <%=
errors_for :maintenance_report %> generates for the error you are
expecting. Or have I missed a subtlety of your question?

Colin

2009/5/21 Phoenix R. [email protected]

3

Thanks for your reply Colin. In theory, there should be some way I
can test for the presence or absence of errors on something like:
@report.notifiers.errors.on (something?)

The thing is, since the post creates a new record for the associated
model, I’m not quite sure how to “access” that.

4

I think maybe
assert assigns(:report).notifiers.errors.on(:fieldname)
where fieldname is the field that you have added the error on.
Or something like that anyway.
If it doesn’t work you could break into the test code with the ruby
debugger
at that point, then you can inspect the variables and see what is where.

Colin

2009/5/21 Phoenix R. [email protected]

5

Colin, thanks for your help. You got me thinking in a different
direction.

I tried what you had there, but noticed that the test didn’t even get
to that point. It failed IMMEDIATELY after the original post, so the
assertion never fired. Which got me thinking: why not a rescue?

begin
post :edit, {:m => m, :id => m.id, :notifiers => [1, 2, 3, ‘’, 0,
‘asdfasf’, “\n\n;’;’’’’;UPDATE notifiers SET label=“hacked””],
:new_notifiers => “not a valid email!asdfasdfasf afd asdfasf 2
wgw@a asdf…\n\n\n\t\[email protected]”}
rescue ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid => e
assert_equal “Validation failed: Email is an invalid e-mail
address.”, e.message
end

This works perfectly. Thanks for your help!