Question

Trying to make a simple application in rails 3.

If I create a team model with rails g scaffold team name:string && rake db:migrate, then run rake, I get success from the prebuilt tests.

If I simply add validates_uniqueness_of :name to the team model. The functional tests fail with

  1) Failure:
test_should_create_team(TeamsControllerTest) [/test/functional/teams_controller_test.rb:20]:
"Team.count" didn't change by 1.
<3> expected but was
<2>.

I modified tests/fixtures/teams.yml to look like this:

one:
    name: MyString
two:
    name: MyString2

The test still fails.

It can’t get much more basic than this; what have I missed?

Answer 1

Fixtures basically represent model instances that are in the database.

If you look at the top of test/functional/teams_controller_test.rb you’ll see

setup do
  @team = teams(:one)
end

and then in your failing functional test you’ll have

post :create, :team => @team.attributes

This is what’s happening: you’re trying to create a new team with the same attributes as “the team fixture named :one”. Since both would have the same name (since they have the exact same attributes), the uniqueness validation is failing.

Try replacing your setup block with this

setup do
  @team = teams(:one)
  @team.name = 'unique name'
end

Now you’ll be creating a new team with the name ‘unique name’ (which isn’t in the database according to the fixtures), and your test will pass.