Question

Note: I’m only posting this question so that others may find it if they ever need to, as I have found a good solution.

In my controller tests, I don’t want to commit to the database, but I still want the controllers to use finder methods to get mock objects (by mocking the find method), but then I want to use dom_id on those mocks in assert_select, to verify that they’re being displayed.

However, since they’re non-saved objects, dom_id keeps returning new_object instead of object_1, object_2, et cetera.

Is there any quick way to get it to work? I really don’t want to persist real records in tests.

Answer 1

Suppose you’re using ActiveSupport::TestCase and FactoryGirl for building model objects, you can add this to your test/test_helper.rb file:

# Generate model with id - useful for assert_select with dom_id
def model(name, options = {})
  @next_id = {} if @next_id.nil?
  @next_id[name] = 1 unless @next_id.has_key(name)

  m = build(name, options)
  m.id = @next_id[name]
  @next_id[name] += 1
  m
end

Then, suppose you’re using RR as your mocking library, you can do something like this:

test 'something' do
  posts = [model(:post), model(:post)]
  mock(Post).all { posts }
  get :index
  assert_select "##{dom_id(posts.first)}", posts.first.title
end