Comments on: Rails, Fixtures, the Test DB, and Test::Unit

By: ActiveRecord: the Visual Basic of Object Relational Mappers at Pervasive Code

ActiveRecord: the Visual Basic of Object Relational Mappers at Pervasive Code — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 02:08:11 +0000

[...] with a combination of a plugin and some customization, described in detail in my previous post, Rails, Fixtures, the Test DB, and Test::Unit. With those changes, all test fixture data is preloaded in the right order (so constraints [...]

By: Alex Le

Alex Le — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 17:37:36 +0000

I believe that my ActiveFixture can be utilized to solve this headache of yours (FYI: ActiveFixture reads the belongs_to tag in your models and do a graph-traversal to get the correct order of fixture insertions — this means that fixtures are loaded based on their foreign-key constraints thus always be in the correct insertion sequence ).

The Preloaded Fixtures main call to the fixture can just be replaced by ActiveFixture.load_fixtures(), e.g.

module PreloadFixtures
def self.preload!
ActiveFixture.load_fixtures()
end
…
end

I’ll do some more research and see how ActiveFixture can be utilized better then just a rake task. The current SVN to activefixture is at
http://activefixture.rubyforge.org/svn/

Cheers!

Alex

By: Jamie Flournoy

Jamie Flournoy — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 17:19:01 +0000

The following hack is what I used originally. Now I use the Preload Fixtures plugin instead, which loads all fixtures up front and also disables per-test fixture loading.

# This code is taken from a comment in http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/2404
# it makes the test fixtures get loaded once and only once, and removes the
# deletion-before-reloading-fixture-data step, so FKs never have a reason to
# complain. -JF
# neuter fixture deletions and multiple fixture insertions to work with database constraints
class Fixture
  attr_reader :class_name
end
class Fixtures
    @@inserted_fixture_list = {}
    alias original_insert_fixtures insert_fixtures
    def insert_fixtures
        return if 0 == values.size
        return if values.size > 0 && @@inserted_fixture_list[values[0].class_name]
        @@inserted_fixture_list[values[0].class_name] = true
        class_name = values[0].class_name
        if class_name.respond_to? "constantize"
            table_name = values[0].class_name.constantize.table_name
        else
            table_name = values[0].class_name.table_name
        end
        unless ActiveRecord::Base.connection.select_one("select 1 from #{table_name}")
            original_insert_fixtures
        end
    end
    def delete_existing_fixtures() end
end

By: Sydney

Sydney — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 01:36:38 +0000

Could you post the hack you did to prevent fixture data being wiped out and reloaded for each test?

Thanks – having the same headaches.

By: Pat Maddox

Pat Maddox — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 05:08:29 +0000

This won’t help you with the subsequent problems, but if you uncomment the

config.active_record.schema_format = :sql

line in config/environment.rb, rake will do a SQL schema dump instead of the Ruby-based schema.rb file. This will include constraints, triggers, functions, etc.

I agree that Rails testing is a pain when it comes to having a non-retarded database. Unfortunately that’s the way it (currently) is and you just have to do some more work.

Fixtures especially are a PITA…you might be interested in doing fixtures without really doing fixtures