Question

Say I have a REST service that handles an XML via POST:

class DepartmentsController < ApplicationController

  # POST /departments/1/employees.xml
  def create
    params[:employees].each do |e| # <employees type="array">
      @employee = Employee.new(e)
      @employee.save
    end
    respond_to do |format|
      format.any { head status }
    end
  end

end

The XML it expects is something like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<exmployees type="array">
  <employee>
    ...
  </employe>
  <employee>
    ...
  </employe>
</employees>

The service works as expected when interacting with an iPhone app, but I can’t manage to get it working with my functional test (I’m a Rails newbie).

So here’s what I’m trying:

  test "should create employees with client data" do
    xml_out = ""

    xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new(:target => xml_out, :indent => 2)
    xml.instruct!
    xml.employees :type => "array" do
      xml.employee do
        # ...
      end
    end

    assert_difference('Employee.count') do
      @request.env['RAW_POST_BODY'] = xml_out
      post :create, :department_id => 234
    end
  end

And the error I’m getting:

NoMethodError: You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
You might have expected an instance of Array.

It seems the ‘params’ variable is missing the post data:

{"department_id"=>234, "controller"=>"employees", "action"=>"create"}

I’ve checked the content of ‘xml_out’, and it does contain the properly formed XML. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for your help 🙂

Answer 1

Try changing your code to:

post :create, :department_id => 234, :employees => Hash.from_xml(xml_out)

EDIT

From the comments, the final solution was:

post :create, :department_id => 234, :employees => Hash.from_xml(xml_out)["employees"]