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Add Factorygirl as an alternative to fixtures #1279

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Merged
merged 5 commits into from
Sep 8, 2016

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gravitystorm
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FactoryGirl is a widely used alternative to fixtures in tests. The fixtures are annoying since every time you want to test something slightly different (for example, a diary entry with an apostrophe in its title), you need to add a whole new fixture and rework the tests. Fixtures are also a pain when the model attributes change.

This PR adds FactoryGirl, and reworks two model tests (DiaryEntry and DiaryComment) to use them.

Since the database also contains fixtures from other tests, some
counts are dropped and instead tested for inclusion in the results.
@@ -1,10 +1,8 @@
require "test_helper"

class DiaryCommentTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
api_fixtures
fixtures :diary_comments

def test_diary_comment_count
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This test name doesn't really reflect what the test does any more... Then again I'm not really sure what it is testing now - is it actually just testing that FactoryGirl can create records? or does that itself funnel through the rails code so that we're testing rails can create records?

@gravitystorm
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Thanks for the comments. One of the problems is that the original tests are a bit pointless - they are mostly asserting that the fixtures have loaded, or that Rails itself is working (e.g. build a model from attributes, whatdoyouknow, the model has those attributes). The refactored versions are still mostly trivial, and often a bit pointless too.

I would prefer to rewrite most of these tests completely to test our "business logic" instead. But I was wary of trying to do too many things at once, since I'm always suspicious when people start rewriting tests instead of refactoring them!

I'll fix the specific points you've raised, and make a separate PR with some more thorough rewriting.

@tomhughes
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tomhughes commented Sep 8, 2016

Yes I always find that a lot of model tests involve a fair bit of "what exactly are we really testing here" head scratching...

I mean obviously if you have a method with some additional logic in it on a model that's fine and can be tested but a lot of the time the tests as you say seem to be testing rails more than our code. I think things that make sense in a model test are:

  • That any additional methods written by us work
  • That associations return the expected records, especially where they involved filtering, ordering, etc
  • That validations allow/reject the correct things

On the other handing, testing that count returns the right number of records is probably less useful ;-)

@tomhughes tomhughes merged commit 191f6b3 into openstreetmap:master Sep 8, 2016
@gravitystorm gravitystorm deleted the factorygirl branch October 19, 2016 08:16
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2 participants