In rspec-2, integration specs live in spec/requests. Is that where you have them? If not, please try changing the directory name and let me know if that solves the problem.

As for Cucumber, I use it myself, but I don't have enough context to make a recommendation for your book.

They're in spec/requests. In fact, they aren't all broken; I have several passing tests that don't require maintaining state. For example, I have integration specs like

it "should have a Home page at '/'" do
  get '/'
  response.should have_selector('title', :content => "Home")
end

that work just fine. The problem lies in the (non-)persistence of data in the test database between requests.

I figured out the problem. The issue was that I had set config.cache_classes to false in test.rb. I did this because currently Spork doesn't reload the application files when using Autotest, leading to the absurd situation of not being able to get, say, a failing Users controller spec example to pass by editing the Users controller. (This undermines BDD just a bit.)

Unfortunately, setting config.cache_classes = false also breaks the database support in integration testing. The big breakthrough came when I tried an alternate Cucumber implementation, and it spit out a warning that config.cache_classes = false breaks transactional rollback. That was the hint I needed to start fiddling with the class caching.

By the way, the workaround I came up with is to force-load the application files on each run:

Spork.each_run do
  # Force-load all the app files.
  # This is because (as of this writing) changes to the app/ files
  # aren't loaded when running autotest with spork.
  # We could set config.cache_classes to false in test.rb,
  # but that breaks integration testing.
  Dir["#{Rails.root}/app/**/*.rb"].each { |f| load f }
end

Thanks for posting this info.

You're welcome. And thanks for the great work on RSpec. In the acknowledgments to the Rails Tutorial book, I express my gratitude to all the Rubyists who have taught and inspired me, and you are one of them.

@mhartl: Thanks for your solution, it got me digging. What you proposed works, but there's a flaw: If you remove a method from a class it won't be removed on reloading.

I've found a different solution that works in that case too:

Spork.prefork do
  # .........

  # Emulate initializer set_clear_dependencies_hook in railties/lib/rails/application/bootstrap.rb
  ActiveSupport::DescendantsTracker.clear
  ActiveSupport::Dependencies.clear
end

Spork.each_run do
  # Dir["#{Rails.root}/app/**/*.rb"].each { |f| load f }
end

# In config/application.rb
module Inviteapp
  class Application < Rails::Application
    # .........

    if Rails.env == 'test'
      initializer :after => :initialize_dependency_mechanism do
        # Work around initializer in railties/lib/rails/application/bootstrap.rb
        ActiveSupport::Dependencies.mechanism = :load
      end
    end
  end
end

You might be interested in http://github.com/timcharper/spork/issues#issue/37.

Thanks. Yes, that is interesting. With respect to the flaw mentioned by @MSch, I'll give the new solution a try. Having to restart the Spork server on method removal isn't too bad, though, since that's not too common a case.

@MSch: I tried to implement your workaround, but it failed with the error uninitialized constant ActiveSupport::DescendantsTracker (NameError). Any idea why? I tried including Active Support by hand, but couldn't get it to work.

To get this to work on Rails 3 Beta 4 remove this line from my hack above: ActiveSupport::DescendantsTracker.clear

doesn't work with rails3 rc

@gudelk - what are you seeing?

Sorry, my fault. I had some other issues that caused problems.
Tried with a blank rails3-rc project using the solution mentioned above, and it works :)
Tested with rails-3.0.0.rc, rspec-2.0.0.beta.19, spork-0.8.4 and ruby-1.9.2-rc2

Is this solution still working for Rails 3.0 final? I got the code below in my spec_helper.rb and config/application.rb, but I don't see my Rails code getting reloaded.

# spec/spec_helper.rb
require 'rubygems'      
require 'spork'
require 'active_support/dependencies'

Spork.prefork do
  ActiveSupport::Dependencies.clear
end

Spork.each_run do
end

ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= 'test'
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../config/environment" 

Dir["#{File.dirname(__FILE__)}/support/**/*.rb"].each {|f| require f}
Dir["#{File.dirname(__FILE__)}/fixtures/**/*.rb"].each {|f| require f}

RSpec.configure do |config|
end

# config/application.rb
module Workers
  class Application < Rails::Application  
    config.autoload_paths << Rails.root.join('lib')

    config.generators do |g|
      g.orm             :mongoid
      g.test_framework  :rspec
    end

    config.encoding = "utf-8"

    config.filter_parameters += [:password]

    if Rails.env == 'test'
      initializer :after => :initialize_dependency_mechanism do
        # Work around initializer in railties/lib/rails/application/bootstrap.rb
        ActiveSupport::Dependencies.mechanism = :load
      end
    end      
  end
end

Nothing has changed in rspec that should impact this. With spork, I always put everything in the file other in one of the two spork blocks.

any news on this issue? I'm on rails-3.0.0 and spork doesn't seem to reload any classes, I tried all hacks mentioned here.

knoopx - check the spork tracker