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Why isn't factory_girl operating transactionally for me? - rows remain in database after tests

Answer 1

A:

Inside of test/test_helper.rb make sure that you have the following.

class ActiveSupport::TestCase
  self.use_transactional_fixtures = true
  #...
end

Despite the name "fixtures" this works with factory_girl as well.

jdl 2010-08-16 21:16:53

Even though it looks right, that doesn't seem to fix the problem. I'm working through Michael Hartl's RailsTutorial and doing a second writing of the code he originally wrote. When I copied it word-for-word it all worked fine and I know that I never added the user_transactional_fixtures flag. Now though for some reason it's failing on the rewrite project even if I add that.

Peter Nixey 2010-08-16 23:14:29

Answer 2

+2 A:

Finally fixed this and I hope I can save someone the six hours of debugging it took me to figure it out.

By a) getting lucky and ending up with a version of code that worked and b) stripping both sets of code down this is what I found:

Test that chokes up

require 'spec_helper'

describe UsersController do

  @user = Factory.create(:user) 
  # miserable failure :(
end

Test that works

require 'spec_helper'

describe UsersController do

  it "should make a factory models without choking" do
    @user = Factory.create(:user)   
  end
  # huzzah success!
end

The transaction is defined by the it "should do something" do... statement. If you instantiate the factory outside that statement it turns out not to be transactional.

You can also put it outside the "it should.." block as long as it's in a "before..end" block

require 'spec_helper'

describe UsersController do

  before(:each) do
    @user = Factory.create(:user) 
  end

  it 'should make a factory without choking' do
    puts @user.name
    # prints out the correnct name for the user
  end
end

On experimenting, it seems to be valid to define a user outside of an "it should do..end" block as long as it's in a "before.. end" block. I guess this is only executed in the scope of the "it should do..end" block and therefore works fine.

[Thanks to @jdl for his (also correct) suggestion]

Peter Nixey 2010-08-17 02:45:32

any idea on how this behaves inside a let ? like so: let(:something) {Factory(:something)}

Cezar 2010-09-10 14:08:05

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Why isn't factory_girl operating transactionally for me? - rows remain in database after tests

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