Testing with foreign keys

rubyonrails-talk
1

I'm looking for a plugin/whatever for preloading fixtures, to run tests with FKs defined.

Specifying load order just doesn't work for me, I need to purge the test db, load all fixtures, and only then create the FK constraints.

Any suggestions?

Isak

2

Isak,

I use the foreign key support offered by the redhillonrails_core plugin.

Redhill plugins: http://www.redhillconsulting.com.au/rails_plugins.html

redhillonrails_core plugin svn repo: svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/redhillonrails/trunk/vendor/plugins/redhillonrails_core

To run tests I just clone the development database.

$ rake db:test:clone_structure

Now your test database has all your foreign keys. Just specify your fixtures in order (in your tests) and you shouldn't have any problems. For example if a customer belongs to an account and has a foreign key contraint customers(account_id) to accounts(id) then the following order will load the fixtures fine.

class CustomersControllerTest < Test::Unit::TestCase   fixtures :accounts, :customers end

If you really want to preload all the fixtures then just make a custom rake task:

desc "Load fixtures into the current environment's database in order"     task :load => :environment do       require 'active_record/fixtures'       ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(RAILS_ENV.to_sym)       [         :accounts,         :customers,         :jobs       ].each{|f| Fixtures.create_fixtures('test/fixtures', f) }     end

Hope this helps.

3

What we're doing is define all the fixtures in test_helper.rb so you don't have to define them in each test file.