Test errors in fuctional test after adding before_filter :login_required to controller

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello,

I added the "before_filter" to my controllers to require a login of the user.

Here's an example of my Unit Controller with the added before_filter:

IN THE ATTACHED FILE

When executing the tests with rake test, I get different error messages.

To show you my errors, I only executed the unit controller test with the following line: ruby -Itest test/functional/units_controller_test.rb

I get the folowing errors:

IN THE ATTACHED FILE

If I delete the "before_filter :login_required" line from the unit controller, the test will be executed without any errors.

I have a controller_authentication.rb file within my /lib directory. The content of the file:

IN THE ATTACHED FILE

Can I use one of the methods to get access for the tests?

I tried to find a solution for that problem, but I could not find any during the last two days. Please give me advice to solve that problem.

Thanks in advance, Andre

Attachments: http://www.ruby-forum.com/attachment/6092/controller_and_error.txt

2

Phil

Hello,

I added the “before_filter” to my controllers to require a login of the

user.

Here’s an example of my Unit Controller with the added before_filter:

IN THE ATTACHED FILE

When executing the tests with rake test, I get different error messages.

To show you my errors, I only executed the unit controller test with the

following line:

ruby -Itest test/functional/units_controller_test.rb

I get the folowing errors:

IN THE ATTACHED FILE

If I delete the “before_filter :login_required” line from the unit

controller, the test will be executed without any errors.

I have a controller_authentication.rb file within my /lib directory. The

content of the file:

IN THE ATTACHED FILE

Can I use one of the methods to get access for the tests?

I tried to find a solution for that problem, but I could not find any

during the last two days.

Please give me advice to solve that problem.

You’ll need to create a user and make sure they are logged in, within any of your tests that require the user to be logged in. How you do this depends on you’re authenticating your users…

3

In your tests, you'll need to log in a user otherwise the before_filter in your controller redirects to the login page.

I suggest you change a portion of your authentication code, in particular

  def logged_in?     # current_user     session[:user_id]   end

So instead of calling current_user, which hits the database to fetch the User by the way, you can just return session[:user_id]. This is good enough to figure out if a user is logged in as it will return nil if the key :user_id is not set, and nil is as good as false in ruby.

With that change, you can then set a session variable in your functional test, eg

class UnitsControllerTest < ActionController::TestCase   def test_index     get :index, { }, { 'user_id' => 1 }     assert_template 'index'   end

The first hash after the action is for parameters, and the second one is for session variables.

Ideally though, you should be testing different scenarios to see what the behavior will be when a user is logged in or not.

I highly recommend that you look at shoulda and flexmock for testing. Shoulda allows you to easily nest contexts for your tests while flexmock allows you to set up mocks to avoid hitting the database or setting up session variables as done above.

Instead, you can have something like this in your test_helper.rb

def be_logged_in   flexmock(@controller).should_receive(:logged_in?).and_return(true) end

def be_logged_out   flexmock(@controller).should_receive(:logged_in?).and_return(false) end

Then in your shoulda setup blocks, you just call one of those two helpers depending on the context you are testing.

Have fun, Franz

4

I found a solution that uses fixtures and executes the tests without any errors. I wrote a short article at:

http://www.faustas.de/rails-test-error-beforefilter-loginrequired-controller