Rails Rendering: Intermittent Resource not found (ActionView::TemplateError)

Question

Hi all,

I could use some help figuring out what's going on. Check the log output below -- why would rails treat the two renders differently? Why does one succeed, without any related SQL calls and the second fail -- with an SQL access. (It's not an ActiveRecord model, no SQL should be involved in this render.)

Background

I have a cucumber feature with two scenarios that each rely on Webrat to resolve the step 'When I go to the list of articles' The Article model is not an ActiveRecord model, and shouldn't rely on SQL for access.

If I order the scenarios #1, #2 in the file, the first scenario passes all tests, while the second scenario fails, as expected, at a later different step.

If I order the scenarios #2, #1 in the file, the #2 scenario fails as expected, after passing the step in question. But the #1 scenario now fails the 'When I go to the list of articles' step with:

Resource not found (ActionView::TemplateError) features/article.feature:23:in `When I go to the list of articles'

test.log contents

-------- webrat test is successful - non-db backed model --------------

Processing ArticlesController#index (for 127.0.0.1 at 2009-08-12 13:22:37) [GET]
  Parameters: {"action"=>"index", "controller"=>"articles"}
Rendering template within layouts/application
Rendering articles/index
Completed in 9ms (View: 6, DB: 0) | 200 OK [http://www.example.com/ccc/articles]
REQUESTING PAGE: GET /ccc/articles/new with {} and HTTP headers {"HTTP_REFERER"=>"/ccc/articles"}

-------- webrat test fails ---------------------

Processing ArticlesController#index (for 127.0.0.1 at 2009-08-12 13:22:37) [GET]
  Parameters: {"action"=>"index", "controller"=>"articles"}
Rendering template within layouts/application
Rendering articles/index


Processing ApplicationController#index (for 127.0.0.1 at 2009-08-12 13:22:37) [GET]
  Parameters: {"action"=>"index", "controller"=>"articles"}
      ^[[4;35;1mSQL (0.1ms)^[[0m   ^[[0mROLLBACK^[[0m

Answer 1

In order to rule out some possibilities: change the location of the articles index page in paths.rb to something like "/test.html" and put that file in "/public" -- see if the steps exhibit the same behavior. If they do, something is most likely wonky in one of your test setup/teardown actions. If they do not, I'd look through the logic of the action itself and the contents of the template to understand what might be happening.