Reloading Associations causes Tests to Fail

rubyonrails-talk
1

I broke a test in an odd way today and it brought up some design and testing questions. I was working through some problems in my integration tests, and all was going well. I found that to get a certain test to pass, I changed this

class Container    belongs_to :parent, :polymorphic=>true    def connected_to?(other)      return false if parent.nil?      parent.connected_to_container?(other)    end end To this:

  def connected_to?(other)     return false if parent.nil?     parent(true).connected_to_container?(other)   end

I then made a few other changes, my integration test passed and I reran the whole test suite. When I did, the unit test for Container which had passed for quite a while, suddenly dumped Red tests all over the place. I discovered that by reloading the association the Mock that I had so carefully crafted to go in its place got replaced by what was actually in the database -- that is nil.

I ended up changing the way my integration tests work a little so I could revert the change in Container, but it left me with some questions:

1) Should a model ever force a reload of its associations?

2) If a model does reload its associations how do you still use mocks?

2

you need to expect the reload when you build the mocks. so when parent is called it returns the mock.