Nondestructive testing environment on legacy db

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

I’ve been trying to Google for an answer to this, but the suggestions I’ve found have been either contradictory or seemingly outdated.

I’m building a Rails frontend for a legacy Oracle database, and I want to do proper tests with RSpec/Cucumber. What I can’t seem to figure out is how to run tests without destroying and rebuilding the database.

I’m well aware that that’s the ‘best practice’ way of doing it… but I’m dealing with a massive, >6GB beast with hundreds of tables, byzantine constraints, and a rat’s nest of spaghetti code in the form of triggers and stored procs.

Seriously, I have nightmares about this database as well.

But, I’ve been slogging away at it, and created a web app that’s impressed the bosses, and the vendor for that matter. But I also have nightmares about the fact that I don’t have a test suite. This horrifies me.

What I’d like to do is test against the dev db, since if it gets horribly b0rked, I can restore from the previous night’s ComVault backup.

I saw the suggestion to edit the rake task in the old rspec_on_rails plugin so that

spec_prereq = :noop

I was curious if there was a good way to do this with the current rspec-rails gem…

I’m on Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.0.4

Thanks,

Jason Lewis

Email jasonlewis.x@gmail.com

Mobile 414.310.2665

Blog: http://duckpunching.wordpress.com/

2

Hi,

I’ve been trying to Google for an answer to this, but the suggestions I’ve found have been either contradictory or seemingly outdated.

I’m building a Rails frontend for a legacy Oracle database, and I want to do proper tests with RSpec/Cucumber. What I can’t seem to figure out is how to run tests without destroying and rebuilding the database.

I would recommend isolating your test data. Ideally put it into something like Factories (Factory Girl, Machinist,etc) as much as possible. Try to focus in specifically on exactly what you are testing. I am not the best example (yet) but my current project has also shown me why it is good to mock and stub rather than depend on data (I am dealing with legacy data).

As for the db – couldn’t you just backup the oracle db and dump the data out of it? I am assuming you are using the legacy schema and not the rails schema way of doing things. Ideally get to an empty db that you can tell your test suite to recreate each time you run your tests.