Test (Behaviour) Driven Development

Recently I saw a pretty nice post:

"If you see anyone pushing code to Rails without tests, ping me and I will gladly revert. In 2011, this should be unacceptable."

I remember times when I had a project which was developed test driven at my former place of work. Of course the Test Driven initiator was me, and by time the teammates embraced the methodology and it managed to be a very successful project.

The most exciting thing was that I never had to debug; the tests always showed me the exact the location of the problem -if there was any.
Another almost unbelievable fact was that days before releases we didn't have any unfinished tasks. We were down on the streets having a Budweiser or limonade and we were chatting. What I mean here is that the test batteries saved us so much time that we never had to work overtime. We were just shipping the product confidently days before the planned release. I also remember some sales meetings where this project was showed to the customers as a success story. I also remember one of the questions one customer asked: "Then why don't you write software this way every time?" and the answer was "Because some customers simply dictate to not write any test at all..." Well everyone in the meeting laughed. But we all knew that this decision would cause any customer to throw out hundreds of thousand of dollars and hundreds of hours of overtime for the developers without mentioning the moral downgrade for every involved party. Maybe we were laughing at that unintelligent stereotype.
I also remember one important fact while writing this. In the initial project schedule the testing time wasn't calculated. We simply adopted the test first and then the benefits showed themself over and over again. We couldn't run out of the schedule... :) Almost unbelievable but it was true.

After the project has been finished I have tried to introduce this methodology in as many projects as I could. Unfortunately there were some projects where the mass was so frozen that my attempts were totally ignored. Sometimes the reason for ignorance was simply the lack of infrastructure. Fortunately the infrastructure is not a problem in Ruby on Rails. The community is also mostly test-centered.

I cannot emphasize enough for every developer in any domain to embrace this Test First thinking. There are so many benefits of it that many books have been written about it. And who knows, maybe you who will embrace this approach, will have some similar success story to tell the world

autotest, zentest, autotest-rails, autotest-rails-pure: which gems to choose?

It was a little bit confusing for me which "autotest like" gems to choose when I want to autotest my rails application.
Well... There are some alternatives depending which testing framework I choose rspec or Test::Unit, also there are alternatives if I want to generate the tests for my controller actions automatically with zentest or I just want to write them in some other way.

Zentest was the first tool in this domain with a lot of features. Then autotest-standalone was factored out from it. There is also an empty gem called Autotest which is dependent on Zentest.

Because the main idea is to simply map the lib and test directories, in order to test rails application we need to tell the rails specific mappings. This is done by the autotest-rails and rspec-rails and autotest-rails-pure gems. So let's walk through each of the alternatives

Test::Unit

In this case the rails specific mappings are done by the autotest-rails-pure or autotest-rails gems.
The code excerpt which makes the mapping for the controllers is:

    add_mapping %r%^app/controllers/application_controller\.rb$% do |_, m|
      files_matching %r%^test/(controllers|views|functional)/.*_test\.rb$%
    end

For the core autotest we can use the autotest-standalone or the feature rich old Zentest.

Rspec

The rails specific mapping is done by the rspec-rails in case we opt for using rspec

Here is an excerpt wich does the mapping for the controllers:

    add_mapping(%r%^app/controllers/(.*)\.rb$%) { |_, m|
      if m[1] == "application"
        files_matching %r%^spec/controllers/.*_spec\.rb$%
      else
        ["spec/controllers/#{m[1]}_spec.rb"]
      end
    }

So there are a plenty of alternatives we can choose from and it is good to know which opportunities are available. We have all we need :)

Making the Factory Girl to support Paperclip

Hi Rubysts,

Paperclip and Factory Girl Rails both of them are my loved gems.
Unfortunately Factory Girl Rails can't create the model if the model had been Papercliped. Well at least not in Rails 3.0.7. But the good news is that it can be solved by adding a few lines of Ruby code to our factory.

This is my model:

class Club < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :dancers
  has_attached_file :photo, :styles => { :medium => "300x300>", :thumb => "100x100>" }
  validates_attachment_presence :photo
  validates_attachment_size :photo, :less_than => 1.megabytes
end

So in order to use the factory with ease we need to tell our factory to upload some pictures into our model.
Therefore let me show you an example how to write the factory which makes the two gems to co-work:

include ActionDispatch::TestProcess

class Club
  attr_accessor :photo_file_name
  attr_accessor :photo_file_size
  has_attached_file :photo, :styles => { :medium => "300x300>", :thumb => "100x100>" },
                    :url  => "/test_can_be_deleted/:attachment/:id/:style/:filename",
                    :path => ":rails_root/public/test_can_be_deleted/:attachment/:id/:style/:filename"
end

Factory.define :club do |c|
  c.title 'Limpex'
  c.sefurl 'Limpasm'
  c.name  'Limpasm'
  c.metadescription 'good etc'
  c.content '<p> a good place</p><p>the icecream is prety damn good</p>'
  c.state 0
  c.city 'Gheorgheni'
  c.email 'some@somplexx.com'
  c.photo   { fixture_file_upload( 'spec/factories/test.png', 'image/png') }
end

As you can observe I have just reopened my model and have redefined the paperclip attachment to point to a different path in order to store the dev and test mode attachments in different places.

That's it. :)