Unit Testing - Persistence of Destroyed Objects?

Rails
1

I was doing some unit testing today and came across something that
surprised
me. Either I am confused, or destroyed objects persist in memory when
doing
unit testing.

To explain: I have a model, Author, which ‘has_many :web_resources’.
One
type of “web resource” for an Author is the authors website. So, to
facilitate easy creation/lookup of websites for authors, I did the
following
in author.rb (simplified):

def website=( str )
wr = self.web_resources.first

We delete the first web resource if str is nil/empty

if str.nil? || str == “”
wr.destroy
return
end

Otherwise, create/modify website

end

def website()
self.web_resources.first
end

Now, I was unit testing this today, and something unexpected (to me)
happend.

@author.website=’’

The following test fails

assert_equal nil, @author.website

However, if I do this, it does not fail

assert_equal nil, Author.find( @author.id ).website

Calling @author.website=’’ is indeed destroying the object, but in the
unit
test calling @author.website the object persists, but if I do a brand
new
Author.find(), it is not there. Am I missing something here?

-Matt

2

Calling @author.website=‘’ is indeed destroying the object, but in the unit
test calling @author.website the object persists, but if I do a brand new
Author.find(), it is not there. Am I missing something here?

-Matt

Calling #destroy removes the row from the database, but the ruby object
stays:

a = Article.find :first
=> #<Article:0x238be9c @attributes={…snip…}>
a.id
=> 1
a.destroy
=> #<Article:0x238be9c @attributes={…snip…}>
a.title # title attr is still available
=> “Welcome to Mephisto”
a.id # id attr is still available
=> 1
Article.find_by_id 1
=> nil # not in the db anymore however

–
rick
http://techno-weenie.net