Question

I’m writing a small CMS as a Rails test project (also planning to use it for my personal website). I want SEO-friendly URLs so I have a test to verify that permalinks are automatically being created based on a page’s title (e.g. About Us => about-us). I can’t figure out why this test is failing, however. Here’s the code (I’m using Rails 2.3.2):

# page_test.rb # note I am using the 'shoulda' framework require 'test_helper'  class PageTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase   should_validate_presence_of :title, :permalink, :content   should_validate_uniqueness_of :title    should 'create permalink automatically' do     p = pages(:sample_page)     p.save      assert_equal 'sample-page', p.permalink   end end  # pages.yml sample_page:   title: Sample Page   permalink: # gets automatically created by model   content: This is a sample page  # page.rb class Page < ActiveRecord::Base   validates_presence_of :title, :permalink, :content   validates_uniqueness_of :title    before_save :generate_permalink    private    def generate_permalink     self.permalink = self.title.parameterize   end end 

What happens is that the permalink is nil, instead of ‘sample-page’ like it’s supposed to be. It works, however, if I manually put the permalink in the fixture and change the test around, for example:

p - pages(:sample_page) p.title = 'Contact Us' p.save  assert_equal 'contact-us', p.permalink 

I could fix it like this, but I’m wondering why it’s not firing the before_save method for the original test.

Answer 1

Alright, I was able to figure it out. I needed to use before_validation as the callback and not before_save