Question

So I am working through the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial. I am currently on section 7.1.3 Testing the User show page using factories.

The code is working and pulls the proper gravatar image however I keep getting an error when running my tests.

Here is the error:

Failure/Error: before { visit user_path(user) }
     ActionView::Template::Error:
       undefined method `downcase' for nil:NilClass

Here is the code from the show.html.erb file:

<% provide(:title, @user.name) %>
<h1>
  <%= gravatar_for @user %>
  <%= @user.name %> 
</h1>
<%= @user.name %>, <%= @user.email %>

Here is the code from the users_helper.rb file:

module UsersHelper
  # Returns the Gravatar (http://gravatar.com/) for the given user.
  def gravatar_for(user)
    gravatar_id = Digest::MD5::hexdigest(user.email.downcase)
    gravatar_url = "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/#{gravatar_id}"
    image_tag(gravatar_url, alt: user.name, class: "gravatar")
  end
end

Here is the code from factories.rb file:

FactoryGirl.define do
  factory :user do
    name "Curtis Test"
    email "[e-mail]"
    password "foobar"
    password_confirmation "foobar"
  end
end

Here is the code from the test file user_pages_spec.rb

require 'spec_helper'

describe "User Pages" do
  subject { page }

  describe "profile page" do
    let(:user) { FactoryGirl.create(:user) }

    before { visit user_path(user) }
    it { should have_selector('h1', text: user.name) }
    it { should have_selector('title', text: user.name) }
  end

  describe "signup page" do
    before { visit signup_path }
    it { should have_selector('title', text: full_title('Sign Up')) }
  end
end

Answer 1

I discovered my problem. It had nothing to do with FactoryGirl. The problem was in my user model (user.rb), the line that was causing the issue was

  before_save { |user| user.email = user.email.downcase! }

The bang after the downcase was causing the email address to be saved as nil since the return of the downcase! is nil. Once I removed that and made the line look like the following it worked just fine.

  before_save { |user| user.email = user.email.downcase }

The way I found it was to load the rails console in test environment and tried to create a new user. I noticed that everything was fine but the email was null.