rails3 tutorial: testing with factories

rubyonrails-talk
1

I'm having trouble understanding what the assigns() method does, as described at the following link:

http://ruby.railstutorial.org/chapters/modeling-and-viewing-users-two#sec:better_user_views

The User model has been 'rake db:test:prepare'ed, but I checked and no records were copied to the test db after doing that. Yet the description of assigns() says that the code:

  describe "GET 'show'" do

    before(:each) do       @user = Factory(:user)     end

   .    .    .

    it "should find the right user" do       get :show, :id => @user       assigns(:user).should == @user     end   end   .   .   . end

'then verifies that the variable retrieved from the database in the action [where the action looks like this:

class UsersController < ApplicationController

  def show     @user = User.find(params[:id])   end

corresponds to the @user instance created by Factory Girl. I don't know where the 'variable retrieved from the database' comes from??

2

Well, I guess I overlooked this statement at the beginning of the section: