Question

I’m trying to test a case in our Ruby on Rails system where we lock a user out after x failed login attempts. The issue I’m having is trying to create a user has reached the number that ‘locks’ his account. I am using Factories to create a user like so-

Factory.define :locked_user, :class => User do |user|
user.name                   "Test Lock"
user.email                  "[e-mail]"
user.password               "blah1234"
user.password_confirmation  "blah1234"
user.login_count             5
end

Where 5 is the ‘magic number’. When I try to use something like

@user = Factory(:locked_user)

It creates a user in the database- but newly created users always have login_count set to zero, so it just logs him in the test. When I try the .build method like so

@user = Factory.build(:locked_user)

It sets a user with login_count = 5 like I want, but then doesn’t see the user as valid and won’t try to log them in (ie, it gives us the ‘bad user/password’ error rather then ‘right user/password but you are locked out’ error). I guess I’m missing something here to get RSpec to pick up the fact that this is valid user but the account should be locked. Can someone help set me straight? Below is the entire desribe block-

describe "with locked account" do
     before(:each) do
      @user = Factory.build(:locked_user)
      @attr = { :email => @user.email, :password => @user.password}
    end

  it "should not allow signin with locked account" do
    post :create, :session => @attr
    flash.now[:error].should =~ /Invalid user locked out/i
  end  
end

Answer 1

I would recommend you either set the login_count after creating the user, or stub the method that tells you if a user login is locked.

For instance, use update_attribute to force the login_count after the user has been created:

before(:each) do
  @user = Factory(:user)
  @user.update_attribute(:login_count, 5)
  @attr = { :email => @user.email, :password => @user.password}
end

Or use stubs to stub out the locked_login?, or equivalent method:

before(:each) do
  @user = Factory(:user)
  @user.stub(:locked_login?).and_return(true)
  @attr = { :email => @user.email, :password => @user.password}
end