HABTM creating duplicate records in test environment

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have the following HABTM associations between two models, MemberEntityAccessibility and MemberEntity:

    has_and_belongs_to_many :member_entities,                               :class_name => "MemberEntity",                               :join_table => "accessibilities_member_entities",                               :foreign_key => "accessibility_id",                               :association_foreign_key => "member_entity_id"

    has_and_belongs_to_many :member_entity_accessibilities,                             :class_name => "Accessibility",                             :join_table => "accessibilities_member_entities",                             :foreign_key => "member_entity_id",                             :association_foreign_key => "accessibility_id"

Also in the MemberEntityAccessibility model I have the following code to allow a member (entity) to be added into the HABTM join table.

    def add_member_entity?(entity)         return false if entity.nil? || member_entities.include? (entity)         member_entities << entity         true     end

When I am testing my code in the test environment (fixtures etc), my exhaustive(!) logging reveals that ActiveRecord attempts to insert the same 'entity' record twice into the join table when there is only one member (entity) object in the collection (member_entities). For example, where an entity object (id=1) is added to 'member_entities' of accessibility object (id=1), ActiveRecord saves two records, each with a compound key of 1,1.

My logging confirms that the member_entities collection only has one entry (as expected) and not two.

Any ideas would be much appreciated - I have hit a wall with this one and wonder if it is something to do with the test environment.

2

The same code runs fine in the development environment - that is, only one record is created in the join table.

Am I overlooking a subtlety in the use of the test environment? For example, I have not defined any fixtures for the join table.

3

I should add that my test file looks like this:

require 'test_helper'

class MemberEntityTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase

  fixtures :users, :member_entities, :properties

  def setup

    @administrator = member_entities(:administrator)     @bob = member_entities(:bob)

  end

  test "create a group" do

    Group.create({:owner => @bob, :pingee_name => "London Albion Players"})

    #does Bob own the new group?     assert_equal @bob, new_group.owner

  end end

The 'create' method in the Group model (which inherits from MemberEntity) create the join table records as well as a bunch of other stuff.

Thank you.