Question

I have a page that’s rendering lots of stuff when I really use it, but renders nothing in Capybara.

Controller goes like this:

class IdeasController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @ideas = Idea.all
  end

Relevant bit of the page goes like this:

<div class="accordion" id="accordion">
  Ideas length is <%= @ideas.length %>.
  <% @ideas.each do |idea| %>
    <div class="accordion-group">
      <div class="accordion-heading">
        <%= link_to(idea.title, '#idea_' + idea.id.to_s, class: "accordion-toggle", data: {toggle: "collapse", parent: "#accordion"}  ) %>
      </div>
      <%= div_for(idea, class: "accordion-body collapse") do %>
          <div class="accordion-inner">
            <%= render :partial => "idea", locals: { :idea => idea } %>
          </div>
      <% end %>
    </div>
  <% end %>
</div>

When viewed in Development, this works beautifully and I get loads of stuff in the view (my db is full of mock data). But when I pop it open mid-test using save_and_open_page, it’s completely empty, and says “Ideas length is 0”.

I did rake db:test:clone and rake db:test:prepare, but nada — stays empty.

Can you help me figure out why? Is there a way to peek into the test db and see if anything’s there?

Edit: Inspired by the comments, I realized the trouble must be that the test environment flushes things out every time, so obviously there’s nothing. In an (apparently misguided) attempt to resolve this, I did:

  before do
    create(:idea)
    visit root_path
    click_link "Log In"
  end

Note the create(:idea) line, which was supposed to trigger my Idea factory and stick a mock idea into the db (the factory works fine with other tests).

Now the page says:

Internal Server Error

SQLite3::BusyException: database is locked: INSERT INTO “users” (“created_at”, “email”, “name”, “provider”, “uid”, “updated_at”) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)

which is beyond weird. Rails s is running in the background.

As requested by commenter, full spec follows:

require 'spec_helper'

describe "Idea page", js: true do

  subject { page }

  before do
    create(:idea)
    visit root_path
    click_link "Log In"
  end

  context "Single idea" do
    before do
      save_and_open_page
        #click_link('Eligendi sint quod quia alias sed sit vitae repellendus.')
    end

    it { should have_selector('a',text:'Claim') }

  end


end

Answer 1

Creating the data using a factory is the correct approach. To fix the sqlite error, you might need to increase the timeout for the database.

To do this, in config/database.yml

Find the test: environment and set

timeout:

To a larger value. As recommended by the question SQLite3::BusyException

After that, ensure that in spec/spec_helper.rb that you have the following line:

  config.use_transactional_fixtures = false

And that you are using something like database_cleaner to keep your test db clean between tests.