# Integration test not calling destroy

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/integration-test-not-calling-destroy/156894>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [January 5, 2009, 1:27am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/integration-test-not-calling-destroy/156894 "2009-01-05T01:27:11Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![avramd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/aca169/32.png) [@avramd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/avramd)\
**Post date:** [January 5, 2009, 1:27am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/integration-test-not-calling-destroy/156894/1 "2009-01-05T01:27:11Z")

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Hello,

I’m writing to describe a problem I ran into, and the solution, which  
I’ve already found, for posterity’s sake, b/c it took a very long time  
to figure out. While I don’t consider myself a rails newbie, this does  
qualify as a rookie mistake.

I was having an integration test fail because its call to my one of my  
app’s destroy controller methods did not appear to be firing. Along  
the way, I tried renaming destroy to destroy2, and that “solved” the  
problem. Except it failed to explain the actual problem.

It turned out that I was mistakenly using ‘get’ instead of ‘post’ in  
the integration test to trigger the method.

For those of you that haven’t run into this yet, the reason this was a  
problem is that magic line that scaffolding puts into every  
controller, that looks like this:

verify :method =\> :post, :only =\> [:destroy, :create, :update],  
:redirect\_to =\> { :action =\> :list }

This traps non-post HTTP calls to the listed actions, and redirects  
them to a safe action. The purpose of this is to make sure that  
(hopefully) all GET requests are non-destructive. This, as you  
probably do already know, is to make sure that web crawlers (e.g.  
search engines) don’t accidentally modify your databases.

In my case, the reason I was using get was that I was equating it to a  
simple hyperlink in one of my templates, rather than a submit button  
on a form. However, the hyperlink in question was _also_ generated by  
scaffold, and it (correctly) had :method =\> :post set, for exactly the  
same reason.

Of course scaffolding can’t predict what other destructive methods you  
might write; technically, you ought to add any destructive method to  
this list, and then only call it via a post. I can’t wait to find out  
how many places I’ve failed to do that…

HTH someone…

-Avram

“In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said: ‘Let there be  
light!’ And then there was still nothing, but you could see it.”