Freezzo.com

I recently had to write some tests against a controller that was filtering based on the requesting format. In this case, I wanted to allow xml requests only, and redirect to login on everything else. This was fine when browsing or using curl by doing a simple:

skip_before_filter :login_required, :only => [:create], :if => Proc.new {|c| c.request.format.xml?}

My problem came when I was trying to create tests to verify that both html and xml requests did in fact produce the correct response. After many hours of messing around, I came up with a simple solution. First I skip the filters for every request, then I have another filter to re-enable them on anything but the xml request:

skip_before_filter :login_required, :only => [:create]
before_fiilter :only => [:create] do |c|
  c.send(:login_required) unless c.request.format.xml?
end

Voila!!! This allowed me to continue with my rails testing and browser and curl work appropriately. (I use curl to test the xml request).

def test_not_logged_in_normal_post
  post :create, :login => "test@test.com", :password => "test"
  assert_response :redirect
end
 
def test_not_logged_in_xml_post
  post :create, :format => 'xml', :login => "test@test.com", :password => "test"
  assert_response :success
end

While writing some tests the other day, I came across a little bit of a stump. I have an action that required the use of a multi-dimensional param such as:

param[:user][:name]

This is exactly what I was doing, but you get the picture. I could have easily changed it to a single array, but that not the point. The solution in this example, would be to nest your hash in the test such as:

def test_should_do_something
  post :create, :some_object=>{
    :name=>'Bob'
  }, :user=>{ :name=>'Something' }
end