Understanding how methods are made available within controller tests

Rails
1

Being new to rails and ruby, I am trying to figure out how things fit
together. In particular i am trying to understand how attributes such
as “session” and “cookies” are made available to Controller tests.
Specifically I am working on a test from the RailsSpace book which
extends Test::Unit::TestCase and only imports the module
ApplicationHelper while attributes such as cookies and session are
defined within the ActionController::TestProcess module. I cannot
figure out how module ActionController::TestProcess is included within
the UserControllerTest.

require File.dirname(FILE) + ‘/…/test_helper’
require ‘user_controller’

Re-raise errors caught by the controller.

class UserController; def rescue_action(e) raise e end; end

class UserControllerTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
include ApplicationHelper

…
…
def authorize(user)
@request.session[:user_id] = user.id
end

def friendly_url_forwarding_aux(test_page, protected_page, user)
get protected_page
assert_response :redirect
assert_redirected_to :action => “login”
post test_page, :user => user
assert_response :redirect
assert_redirected_to :action => protected_page
assert_nil session[:protected_page]
end

def cookie_value(symbol)
cookies[symbol.to_s].value.first
end

def cookie_expires(symbol)
cookies[symbol.to_s].expires
end

thx.

-karl

2

Makes sense. My only confusion is I thought that in ruby methods and
attributes can be imported to a class either through inheritance or
importing a module. In this case, these extra attributes such as
“session”
or “cookies” do not exist within the parent class nor the imported
module.
Is rails including extra modules within my classes at runtime?
Thanks for your help!

-karl

On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 5:53 AM, Frederick C. <

3

On Mar 13, 3:38 am, Karl [email protected] wrote:

Being new to rails and ruby, I am trying to figure out how things fit
together. In particular i am trying to understand how attributes such
as “session” and “cookies” are made available to Controller tests.
Specifically I am working on a test from the RailsSpace book which
extends Test::Unit::TestCase and only imports the module
ApplicationHelper while attributes such as cookies and session are
defined within the ActionController::TestProcess module. I cannot
figure out how module ActionController::TestProcess is included within
the UserControllerTest.

The test_helper file that you require at the top of your test file in
turn requires a bunch of stuff, in particular a file that adds those
methods to test cases.

Fred

4

On Mar 13, 5:55 pm, Karl B. [email protected] wrote:

Makes sense. My only confusion is I thought that in ruby methods and
attributes can be imported to a class either through inheritance or
importing a module. In this case, these extra attributes such as “session”
or “cookies” do not exist within the parent class nor the imported module.
Is rails including extra modules within my classes at runtime?
Thanks for your help!

You can also just reopen a class and add methods to it. if my memory
is correct that is what rails does to Test::Unit::TestCase.

Fred