Question

I’m building an app with some extension parsing functionality mainly with excel files. I want my spec tests to be able to use example excel files. This is easy on my development machine, but how can I include this so that I can run the spec tests on the staging server as well?

I tried including the file in the same directory as the spec test file and it didn’t work.

I’m using roo as the gem to parse Excel files.

The only one I could get to work was explicitly putting in something like:

test_ss = Excel.new('c:/myfolder/excelfile.xls')

I tried putting the file in c:\myapp\spec\ folder where the spec test resides and it couldn’t find it:

test_ss = Excel.new('excelfile.xls')

Answer 1

When you don’t explicitly specify the path, Rails will just assume you mean the rails root. So if you want it to search the spec folder, you have to

Excel.new('spec/excelfile.xls')

or better yet,

Excel.new('#{RAILS_ROOT}/spec/excelfile.xls')

which will be an explicit path that’s unique to each environment.