Question

This is the default test generated with a scaffold I created.

  describe "PUT update", focus: true do
    describe "with valid params" do
      it "updates the requested purchase_order" do
        current_valid_attr = valid_attributes
        purchase_order = PurchaseOrder.create! current_valid_attr
        # Assuming there are no other purchase_orders in the database, this
        # specifies that the PurchaseOrder created on the previous line
        # receives the :update_attributes message with whatever params are
        # submitted in the request.
        # PurchaseOrder.any_instance.should_receive(:update_attributes).with({'these' => 'params'})
        # put :update, :id => purchase_order.id, :purchase_order => {'these' => 'params'}
        PurchaseOrder.any_instance.should_receive(:update_attributes).with(current_valid_attr)
        put :update, :id => purchase_order.id, :purchase_order => current_valid_attr
      end

The problem is I don’t understand what it is supposed to do and I can’t make it pass with the correct attributes. Here’s the error when I ran the test

Failures:

      1) PurchaseOrdersController PUT update with valid params updates the requested purchase_order
         Failure/Error: put :update, :id => purchase_order.id, :purchase_order => current_valid_attr
           #<PurchaseOrder:0x007fe3027521e0> received :update_attributes with unexpected arguments
             expected: ({"id"=>nil, "supplier_id"=>1, "no"=>1305, "no_rujukan"=>"Guiseppe Abshire", "jenis"=>"P", "mula_on"=>Sat, 23 Aug 2003 14:11:42 MYT +08:00, "created_at"=>nil, "updated_at"=>nil})
                  got: ({"id"=>nil, "supplier_id"=>"1", "no"=>"1305", "no_rujukan"=>"Guiseppe Abshire", "jenis"=>"P", "mula_on"=>"2003-08-23 14:11:42 +0800", "created_at"=>nil, "updated_at"=>nil})

Thanks in advance.

valid_attributes

  def valid_attributes
    Factory.build(:purchase_order).attributes
  end

The factory

FactoryGirl.define do
  factory :purchase_order do
      association           :supplier
      sequence(:no)         { |n| Random.rand(1000...9999) }
      sequence(:no_rujukan) { |n| Faker::Name.name }
      sequence(:jenis)      { |n| PurchaseOrder::PEROLEHAN[Random.rand(0..3).to_i] }
      sequence(:mula_on)    { |n| Random.rand(10.year).ago }
    end
end

Answer 1

This test checks that when request comes to PurchaseOrdersController#update action update_attributes method for one of PurchaseOrder models is called and request parameters are properly passed to this method.

The problem here (as stated by error message) is that update_attributes is called with hash of attributes that has all values of type String. That’s because all values of params hash (containing all request parameters) that is most likely used in update action are strings.

On the other hand your current_valid_attr hash contains values of different types like Fixnum and Time. And when time comes to compare expected and received values you get an error, because, for example, no attribute was expected to be Fixnum 1305, but after submitting request it was converted to string and update_attributes received String '1305' instead.

One of the ways to fix the problem is to ensure that all values in current_valid_attr are strings:

no = 1305
mula_on = Time.now
# explicitly convert all attributes to String
current_valid_attr = { :no => no.to_s, :mula_on => mula_on.to_s }

Updated

There is paramify_values method that can be used in tests to convert hash of parameters to the same form that will be received by controller in params hash.