ATTN BITSWEAT: Alternative to Fixtures?

Hi Joe. The basic idea: start with a test database full of fixtures and rely on transaction rollback between tests to keep the database clean. Remove all your fixtures :whatever lines from every test case. Use (clearer) @bob = Person.find_by_name(‘bob’) instead of the (convenient) named accessor people(:bob).

If you already have .yml fixtures in place and just want to ditch their declarations, then you can Rake::Task[‘db:test:prepare’].enhance(‘db:fixtures:load’)

in lib/tasks/testing.rb. Then all fixtures are preloaded for all tests.

If you want to ditch the tyranny of fixtures files also, create a ‘pristine’ fixtures database and clone it to the test database whenever you modify it. In psql:

createdb -T myapp_fixtures myapp_test Then use script/console fixtures (or a database browser) to create and modify.

So, there’s not much to explain: stop using the fixtures feature; assume the data is there are ready to go.

jeremy