Shoulda: Testing contoller filters

Question

So I have decided to investigate the state of Rails' testing. After reading a few accepted answers here on SO talking about how Rails' testing documentation is atrocious I am starting to agree. Thus far, I am apparently not in the club of people that understand Rails testing- even though I understand the framework quite well, or so I thought.

I've read that Shoulda is a good plugin to use so I'm using it. My first test: "ensure method requires an ID parameter"... um sure this makes sense; I want to make sure that my before_filter :validate_id on my controller actually works. This is step 1 of the 3 required to test that my index's GET works the way it is supposed to. FAIL! Clearly the test environment runs differently than the normal Rails stack:

...
lib/action_controller/base.rb:524:in `process_without_filters'
...

checking everywhere I can results in practically no information on including filters when ActionController::TestCase uses get {}. Where do I join "the club of Rails testers" so I can figure this out?

  context "GET :index requires id" do

    setup {      
      get :index
    }

    should_redirect_to('/') { }

  end

Answer 1

Are you sure that failure has anything to do with before_filters? I don't think it does. Look further up the stack for other errors... I'm able to test my app with login requirements no problem.

You're asserting that index requires an id...but requesting it without one. Is it throwing an error because there is no id? Maybe you need to catch that, or test the failure mode with assert_raises.

Answer 2

I agree with Andrew that the problem probably lies elsewhere. I have plenty of functional tests that work with controllers with before_filters, and have never run into the problem you specify.