Rspec and rails problem

Question

I have some strange problem with rspec and rails. So I have model test:

require 'spec_helper'

describe User do
  before(:each) do
    @attr = { name: "johnkowalski", fullname: "John Kowalski", 
      email: "[email protected]", password: "foobar" }
  end

  describe "Create a user" do

    it "test1" do
      User.create!(@attr)
    end

    it "test2" do
      User.create!(@attr)
    end

    it "test3" do
      User.create!(@attr)
      @p = { name: "testowy", fullname: "John Kowalski", 
      email: "[email protected]", password: "foobar" }
      a = User.new(@p)
      a.should_not be_valid
    end

    it "test4" do
      User.create!(@attr)
    end
  end
end

It passes without a problem but when I add some integration test like:

require 'spec_helper'

describe "Users" do
  describe "signup" do
    describe "failure" do
      it "should not make a new user" do
        lambda do
          visit signup_path
          fill_in "Name", with: ""
          fill_in "Full name", with: ""
          fill_in "Email", with: ""
          fill_in "Password", with: ""
          click_button
          response.should render_template("users/new")
          response.should have_selector("div#error_explanation")
        end.should_not change(User, :count)
      end
    end
  end
end

I have failures:

Failures:

  1) Users signup failure should not make a new user
     Failure/Error: visit signup_path
     AbstractController::ActionNotFound:
       The action 'new' could not be found for UsersController
     # ./spec/requests/users_spec.rb:8:in `block (5 levels) in <top (required)>'
     # ./spec/requests/users_spec.rb:7:in `block (4 levels) in <top (required)>'

  2) User Create a user test4
     Failure/Error: User.create!(@attr)
     ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid:
       Validation failed: Email has already been taken
     # ./spec/models/user_spec.rb:28:in `block (3 levels) in <top (required)>'

Finished in 0.77216 seconds
5 examples, 2 failures

First failure is obvious (I have empty controller) but why second happen? Also if I make an integration test that passes, the model test also passes. I use rails 3.1.0.rc5 and rspec 2.6.4. Even when I comment the line a.should_not be_valid it also works. I don't understand it at all.

EDIT: I know that's validation problem but why test4 works in this example:

require 'spec_helper'

describe User do
  before(:each) do
    @attr = { name: "johnkowalski", fullname: "John Kowalski", 
      email: "[email protected]", password: "foobar" }
  end

  describe "Create a user" do

    it "test1" do
      User.create!(@attr)
    end

    it "test2" do
      User.create!(@attr)
    end

    it "test3" do
      User.create!(@attr)
      @p = { name: "testowy", fullname: "John Kowalski", 
      email: "[email protected]", password: "foobar" }
      a = User.new(@p)
      a.should_not be_valid
    end

    it "test4" do
      User.count.should == 0
    end
    it "test5" do
      User.create!(@attr)
    end
  end
end

user.rb :

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_secure_password

  email_regex = /\A[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-.]+\.[a-z]+\z/i
  validates :name, presence: true, length: { maximum: 20 },
            uniqueness: { case_sensitive: false }
  validates :fullname, presence: true, length: { maximum: 30 }
  validates :email, format: { with: email_regex },
            uniqueness: { case_sensitive: false }, length: { maximum: 30 }
  validates :password, length: { in: 5..25 }

end

I found why these things happen. So when I run only model tests, I have something like that in logs:

 (0.0ms)  RELEASE SAVEPOINT active_record_1
   (0.1ms)  SELECT 1 FROM "users" WHERE LOWER("users"."name") = LOWER('testowy') LIMIT 1
   (0.1ms)  SELECT 1 FROM "users" WHERE LOWER("users"."email") = LOWER('[email protected]') LIMIT 1
   (0.1ms)  SELECT COUNT(*) FROM "users" 
   (0.1ms)  SAVEPOINT active_record_1
   (0.1ms)  SELECT 1 FROM "users" WHERE LOWER("users"."name") = LOWER('johnkowalski') LIMIT 1
   (0.1ms)  SELECT 1 FROM "users" WHERE LOWER("users"."email") = LOWER('[email protected]') LIMIT 1
  SQL (0.3ms)  INSERT INTO "users" ("created_at", "email", "fullname", "name", "password_digest", "updated_at") VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)  [["created_at", Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:09:48 UTC +00:00], ["email", "[email protected]"], ["fullname", "John Kowalski"], ["name", "johnkowalski"], ["password_digest", "$2a$10$e1.3fifGcs7PALH1o0GQJ.Ny/QxCS9fRxDJ6NemGkwfFJCpsD51vy"], ["updated_at", Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:09:48 UTC +00:00]]
   (0.0ms)  RELEASE SAVEPOINT active_record_1

But when I run these tests and integration tests I found this in log:

 (0.1ms)  SELECT 1 FROM "users" WHERE LOWER("users"."email") = LOWER('[email protected]') LIMIT 1
   (0.1ms)  SELECT COUNT(*) FROM "users" 
   (0.1ms)  SAVEPOINT active_record_1
   (0.1ms)  SELECT 1 FROM "users" WHERE LOWER("users"."name") = LOWER('johnkowalski') LIMIT 1
  CACHE (0.0ms)  SELECT 1 FROM "users" WHERE LOWER("users"."email") = LOWER('[email protected]') LIMIT 1
   (0.0ms)  ROLLBACK TO SAVEPOINT active_record_1

So the user object is bringing from memory not from database. But by default caching is disabled in test environment, and I have config.action_controller.perform_caching = false in environment/test.rb

How to disable caching in that case?

Answer 1

Always hard to guess how much you know about rspec, so maybe this is all very known to you.

But: are you sure you have the following line in your spec_helper.rb:

config.use_transactional_fixtures = true

This will make sure that after each test all created models are released. Note that everything in a before(:each) takes place inside the transaction (and is rolled back) and what is inside a before(:all) does not (and needs to be cleaned in a after(all).

So, if you use transactional fixtures, it is actually normal that User.count == 0, since all creates are rolled back.

Also there is no use in creating a user four times, on the same level, as the result would (normally be the same).

Secondly, since you seem to be testing your validations, I would suggest taking a look at shoulda, which offers nice shortcuts. E.g. something like

it { should validate_uniqueness_of :email }