Question

It seems the most commonly accepted way to deal with Selenium and tests is to avoid using transactional fixtures and then using something like database_cleaner between tests/scenarios. I recently ran into the following article which suggested doing the following:

spec_helper.rb

class ActiveRecord::Base
  mattr_accessor :shared_connection
  @@shared_connection = nil

  def self.connection
    @@shared_connection || retrieve_connection
  end
end

# Forces all threads to share the same connection. This works on
# Capybara because it starts the web server in a thread.
ActiveRecord::Base.shared_connection = ActiveRecord::Base.connection

This seems loads better for performance than the alternatives. Does anyone have any reason why this shouldn’t be used?

Answer 1

This solution was written by Jose Valim – well respected in the Rails community and a member of the Rails core team. I doubt he would recommend using it if there were issues with it. I personally haven’t had any issues.

Just be aware that if you use Spork this needs to be in the each_run block to work.

FWIW – I have had intermittent capybara test issues with the above patch on Postgres. The Mike Perham solution that @hsgubert has below appears to have solved those issues. I am now use that solution.