Advice/suggestions for testing helpers

Rails
1

I’m having trouble testing helpers. I’ve found the topfunky helper
testing plugin (http://nubyonrails.com/articles/2006/04/07/test-your-
helpers), and I’ve seen the helper testing discussion in the rails
recipe book, but both are falling short. Please let me know if I’m
missing something.

My helpers often need access to current url details, such as the
action and params, and session values. These solutions don’t seem to
address this.

What would be really nice is to have a functional test that would
establish the state for the url and session, and then have it yield or
call back so that the helper functions could be tested.

I might be able to do helper tests after the processing of the
request (in a functional test), if I could figure out how to invoke
the helpers.

My best idea so far is to refactor my helper methods so that I have a
version of the function that doesn’t rely on the session or controller
state, and instead has the appropriate values provided as parameters.

Any other ideas or suggestions?

Thank you.

-Kelly

2

I’m ripping my hair out this one.

I have two select boxes. Both have an ‘observe_field’ on it. The first
select box, when changed, will clear the second select box and, if it
needs
to, adds new options to the second select box. The second select box,
when
changed, will grab a number from the database and put it in a text box.

This all works great, except for the following circumstance.

  1. The second select box is changed to the second option in the list,
    The
    text box is updated.
  2. The first select box is changed to another option, clearing the
    second
    select box.
  3. The first select box is changed to the first option it was on,
    filling
    the second select box with options, with the first option in the list
    showing.
  4. The second select box is changed to the second option in the list.

Nothing happens.
The ‘observe_field’ never fires.

After that, if I pick different selections in the list, it works fine.
So
if I pick the first option and then the second option again, it works.

Has anyone else run into this problem. It seems to happen on both
Firefox 2
and IE 7.

I’ve tried clearing the list in many different ways: Setting the length
to
0, looping backwards through the list and setting each option to null.

I’ve also tried many different ways to set the selection: setting
selectedIndex to 0, adding true to the Option when it’s created when
it’s
the first, setting options[0].selected = true.

Nothing seems to work.

Stephen G.

3

Stephen G. wrote:

I’m ripping my hair out this one.

I have two select boxes. Both have an ‘observe_field’ on it. The first
select box, when changed, will clear the second select box and, if it
needs
to, adds new options to the second select box. The second select box,
when
changed, will grab a number from the database and put it in a text box.

This all works great, except for the following circumstance.

  1. The second select box is changed to the second option in the list,
    The
    text box is updated.
  2. The first select box is changed to another option, clearing the
    second
    select box.
  3. The first select box is changed to the first option it was on,
    filling
    the second select box with options, with the first option in the list
    showing.
  4. The second select box is changed to the second option in the list.

Nothing happens.
The ‘observe_field’ never fires.

After that, if I pick different selections in the list, it works fine.
So
if I pick the first option and then the second option again, it works.

Has anyone else run into this problem. It seems to happen on both
Firefox 2
and IE 7.

I’ve tried clearing the list in many different ways: Setting the length
to
0, looping backwards through the list and setting each option to null.

I’ve also tried many different ways to set the selection: setting
selectedIndex to 0, adding true to the Option when it’s created when
it’s
the first, setting options[0].selected = true.

Nothing seems to work.

Stephen G.

You might get more responses if starting a new thread, instead of
replying to another.

It looks to me you should take a look at the prototype code for
“observe_field”.
Maybe even with the Firebug debugger.

I don’t think the code is that hard, and also not hard to change. We did
that once, to solve a similar problem.

Or maybe you will find a way to reset the value that is compared against
for “observe_field”. I don’t remember.

Stephan