Blog | Rubyyot

I recently had a frustrating situation while using the session to store the id of the current user. I was writing functional tests for my app an was using code based on the acts_as_authenticated plugin. My problem was that I was trying to set the id in the session before I made the get request and for whatever reason it wasn’t working and I kept getting redirected to the login screen.

Now I was not using the acts_as_authenticted_plugin, so

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  def setup
    login_as :quentin
  end

was not available to me. Instead, I tried doing something along the lines of this, which mimics what it seemed that the authenticated_test_helper was doing:

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test "that a request for index will be sucessful" do
  @request.session[:identity_id] = 1
  assert_response :success
end

but that didn’t work either. So I looked around a number of places and finally came across the newly shiny Rails Guide for functional testing. There, before my eyes, was the answer.

The get method kicks off the web request and populates the results into the response. It accepts 4 arguments:

The action of the controller you are requesting. This can be in the form of a string or a symbol.

An optional hash of request parameters to pass into the action (eg. query string parameters or post variables).

An optional hash of session variables to pass along with the request.

An optional hash of flash values.

Four arguments! not only the two I’d used (action and params), but 4. Armed with this knowledge, I soon got my test to pass. Here is a sample passing test

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def setup
  @identity = Identity.make
end
 
test "that a request for index will be sucessful" do
   get :index, nil, build_session_hash_for(@identity)
   assert_response :success
end
 
protected
  def build_session_hash_for identity
    {'identity_id' => identity.id}
  end

Hopefully this will help out someone else who may run into this issue.