Programmers Blog

We had a problem with hard-coded routes in integration tests while using mixed RESTful and default routing. For example we can have in a integration test:

test "my sample test" do
  get 'foo_controler/bar_action'
end

This looks not too nice, a string-hard-coded route to controller and its action.

The quick and fair solution we found was this one: First of all: do not use default routes, use RESTful routing only (see http://www.slideshare.net/ihower/rails-best-practices)

So we comment these things in routes.rb:

  #map.connect ':controller/:action/:id'
  #map.connect ':controller/:action/:id.:format'

Second of all: use named routes instead of the default ones, so we add to routes.rb:

map.foo_controler 'foo_controler/:action/:id', :controller => :foo_controler

And change the integration test to:

test "my sample test" do
  get foo_controler_path(:action => :bar_action)
end

Let me know what you think about that.

EDIT:
I am still learning much rails.
I came across another problem and found the “:only” parameter for the map.resources. This means that one should not use named routes. Only RESTfull routes should be used and the inclusion of the methods you want to implements is done by “:only” as the API says
This example is copied form the API reference:

  map.resources :posts, :only => [:index, :show] do |post|
    post.resources :comments, :except => [:update, :destroy]
  end

Example of adding new, non-standard, routes:

  map.resources :users, :collection => {
    :show_profile => :get,
    :edit_profile => :get,
    :update_profile => :post
  }  

So the above integration test will look diferent. The helper methods can be found by listing the routes with “rake routes”.

I use Aptana IDE (Eclipse) and the escape characters do not look nice in the default console. The way to prevent this is to do:

ActiveRecord::Base.colorize_logging = false

for example in your development.rb file.

I mean rails 2.3.4. If this does not work for you (other version of rails or whatever) just look at the format_log_entry(message, dump = nil) method of class AbstractAdapter in your rails environment RAILS_HOME/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract_adapter or something.

Problem:

/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb install mysql
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lm... yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lz... yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lsocket... no
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lnsl... yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more
details.  You may need configuration options.

Solution:

apt-get install libmysql++-dev

Problem: ERROR: http://gems.rubyforge.org/ does not appear to be a repository

Solution: in my case it was that the repository was down. I checked http://gems.rubyforge.org/ and it was not working. So the solution was to wait for it to work again.

The message displayed by gem is very unfortunate, cos it does not say that the repo is down. There are many other reasons for this message to appear probably not associated with the ups and downs of the site.

This was inspired by: ruby-on-rails-development-on-ubuntu-9-04-jaunty-using-ruby-1-8-6 . That unfortunately did not work for me.

Edit the file:

/etc/apt/preferences

Add to it:

Package: ruby
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: ruby1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libruby1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: rdoc1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: ri1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libgtk2-ruby1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libdbd-sqlite3-ruby1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libopenssl-ruby1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libsqlite3-ruby1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: ruby1.8-dev
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 1001

Package: libdbi-ruby1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libatk1-ruby1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libpango1-ruby1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libatk1-ruby1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libgdk-pixbuf2-ruby1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libglib2-ruby1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libcairo-ruby1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: irb1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libreadline-ruby1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: rails
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libncurses-ruby1.8
Pin: release a=hardy
Pin-Priority: 900

Edit the file:

/etc/apt/sources.list

Add to it:

deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy restricted main multiverse universe  
deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy restricted main multiverse universe  

Install ruby

apt-get update
aptitude install  ruby rdoc irb libyaml-ruby libzlib-ruby ri libopenssl-ruby ruby1.8-dev

Try something like:

p my_variable.inspect

Problem:

rake test:test:rcov

overwrites its output.

Semi-solution that I use: add to Rakefile

namespace :rcov do
  TESTS_DIR = 'test'
  Rcov::RcovTask.new(:all) do |rcov|
    rcov.pattern    = FileList["#{TESTS_DIR}/**/*test*.rb"]
    rcov.output_dir = 'coverage'
    rcov.verbose    = true
    rcov.rcov_opts << "--sort coverage"
  end
end

Then use the task:

rake rcov:all

Problem: while running tests you get

uninitialized constant ActiveRecord (NameError)

Solution: in my case it was that I was tired and ran the tests no on the test class bu on the model class! Strange error though.

Problem:

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.2/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:440:in `load_missing_constant':NameError: uninitialized constant ActionView::Helpers::FormHelper
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.2/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:443:in `load_missing_constant':NameError: uninitialized constant ApplicationController

Solution: for me it was that I did

require "calendar_date_select"

in environment.rb before the config. You have to move that require line to the end of the file.

Problem:

 Paperclip::NotIdentifiedByImageMagickError in Ebook categoriesController#create
 is not recognized by the 'identify' command.
vendor/plugins/paperclip/lib/paperclip/geometry.rb:24:in `from_file'

Solution: you probably did not specify your form as multipart

(...)
form_for @model_name, :html => { :multipart => true } do |f| 
(...)