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Rails Controller Specs with users, roles and nested routes

Posted by admin on Mar 3, 2010 in rails, ruby, tdd

I’ve long put off testing my controllers because of user authentication and nested controllers, dealing with stubs, etc.

But today, a fully working test!

As background, Advertisers have many trackers and the routes look like this:

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# config/routes.rb
ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
  map.resources :advertisers do |advertisers|
    advertisers.resources :trackers
  end
end

To set everything up in the specs, I included all the files in the spec/support directory and used Mocha as my mock framework

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# spec/spec_helper.rb
Dir[File.expand_path(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__),'support','**','*.rb'))].each {|f| require f}

Spec::Runner.configure do |config|
  config.mock_with :mocha
end

Then I set up my factories (rather than fixtures) using Factory Girl

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# spec/factories.rb
Factory.define :user do |user|
  user.sequence(:login) { |n| "username#{n}" }
  user.password 'password'
  user.password_confirmation { |u| u.password }
  user.sequence(:email) { |n| "email#{n}@example.com" }
  user.first_name "Mama"
  user.last_name "Foo"
end

Factory.define :advertiser do |advertiser|
  advertiser.name 'Advertiser 1'
end

Factory.define :tracker do |tracker|
  tracker.name 'Tracker 1'
end

Now we get down to brass tacks. In order to make my tests DRY (appropriately) and allow for all my controllers to test if someone is logged in and has access, I set up this shared context

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# spec/support/user_authentication.rb
describe "an admin is logged in", :shared => true do
  before(:each) do
    controller.stubs( :login_required => true)
    controller.stubs( :current_user => Factory.build(:user, :login => 'admin', :roles_list => ["super"]))
  end
end

From there, all we need to do is put it all together, setting up trackers parent @advertiser and the @tracker we’ll be using and stubbing the ActiveRecord find so that it always returns @advertiser

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# spec/controllers/trackers_controller.rb
describe TrackersController do
  it_should_behave_like "an admin is logged in"
  integrate_views
 
  before(:each) do
    @advertiser = Factory.create(:advertiser)
    @tracker = @advertiser.trackers.create(Factory.attributes_for(:tracker))
    Advertiser.stubs(:find => @advertiser)
  end

Now we simply specify the part of the path that is needed to find the nested route by using :advertiser_id => @advertiser

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# spec/controllers/trackers_controller.rb
  it "index action should render index template" do
    get :index, :advertiser_id => @advertiser
    response.should render_template(:index)
  end
 
  it "show action should render show template" do
    get :show, :advertiser_id => @advertiser, :id => @tracker
    response.should render_template(:show)
  end
 
  it "new action should render new template" do
    get :new, :advertiser_id => @advertiser
    response.should render_template(:new)
  end

  it "create action should render new template when model is invalid" do
    Tracker.any_instance.stubs(:valid?).returns(false)
    post :create, :advertiser_id => @advertiser
    response.should render_template(:new)
  end

  it "create action should redirect when model is valid" do
    Tracker.any_instance.stubs(:valid?).returns(true)
    post :create, :advertiser_id => @advertiser
    response.should redirect_to(advertiser_tracker_url(@advertiser, assigns[:tracker]))
  end
 
  it "edit action should render edit template" do
    get :edit, :advertiser_id => @advertiser, :id => @tracker
    response.should render_template(:edit)
  end
 
  it "update action should render edit template when model is invalid" do
    Tracker.any_instance.stubs(:valid?).returns(false)
    put :update, :advertiser_id => @advertiser, :id => @tracker
    response.should render_template(:edit)
  end
 
  it "update action should redirect when model is valid" do
    Tracker.any_instance.stubs(:valid?).returns(true)
    put :update, :advertiser_id => @advertiser, :id => @tracker
    response.should redirect_to(advertiser_tracker_url(@advertiser, assigns[:tracker]))
  end
 
  it "destroy action should destroy model and redirect to index action" do
    delete :destroy, :advertiser_id => @advertiser, :id => @tracker
    response.should redirect_to(advertiser_trackers_url(@advertiser))
    Tracker.exists?(@tracker.id).should be_false
  end
end

Works! And works great! A minimal and excellent way to test your controllers, especially for access. You can easily create additional shared contexts with different user permissions and extend out the tests to make sure users that don’t have access can properly access them.

 
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PDF Generation in Rails… The Right Way

Posted by admin on Feb 12, 2010 in rails, ruby

As long as we’re talking about efficiency here, one of the ways to be more efficient is to use the right tool for the job.  I’ve done PDF generation on 3 different projects but the PDF generation I did yesterday was by far the easiest.   What I thought would take me 2 days ended up taking about 3 hours (with research, etc).

If you’re not using Ruby to automate some part of your job or life, I feel sad for you (at least a little).   The next time you need to generate PDFs, why not try out the excellent Prawn library?  Not familiar, you say?   Well, let’s dive right in, shall we?

For those of you that used Prawn in an earlier 0.3 form, it’s recently been drastically improved and released as 0.7 in a push towards 1.0.  The APIs are very full featured (if sometimes a wee bit clunky–but PDF generation is a messy business) and simple to use. All of this is even better when integrating Prawn into Rails as a template builder using prawnto:

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./script/plugin install git://github.com/huerlisi/prawnto.git

Even though thorny-sun originally wrote prawnto, their branch is no longer maintained, it appears.  Thank goodness for github since huerlisi seems to have picked up right where they left off.

Once we’ve got prawnto installed, there isn’t actually anything else we need to do to be ready to generate PDFs in our views. Let’s start of with something useful. A table in show.pdf.prawn:

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pdf.font 'Courier' do
  pdf.table object.line_items.collect {|li|
        [
            li.description,
            (li.quantity.nil? ? "" : "#{li.quantity}"),
            (li.rate.to_f == 0 ? "" : number_to_currency(li.rate)),
            (li.amount.to_f == 0 ? "" : number_to_currency(li.amount))
        ]
    },
    :font_size => 8,
    :vertical_padding => 2,
    :headers => ["Description", "Quantity", "Rate", "Amount"],
    :header_color => "888888",
    :header_text_color => "FFFFFF",
    :border_width => 1,
    :width => pdf.bounds.width,
    :column_widths => {0 => pdf.bounds.width-180},
    :align => {2 => :right, 3 => :right}
end

Tell me that isn’t readable? 30 seconds and you can tell exactly what that’s doing.

And we can even extract it to a partial! The only thing you have to do to make it a partial is rename the pdf object to something else, conventionally “parent_pdf”

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parent_pdf.font 'Courier' do
  parent_pdf.table object.line_items.collect {|li|
        [
            li.description,
            (li.quantity.nil? ? "" : "#{li.quantity}"),
       ...
    # etc...

And then call the partial from show.pdf.prawn

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render :partial => 'object', :locals => {:object => @object, :parent_pdf => pdf}

and index.pdf.prawn

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first = true
@objects.each do |object|
  pdf.start_new_page unless first
  render :partial => 'object', :locals => {:object => object, :parent_pdf => pdf}
  first = false
end

And make sure our controller actions can respond to the ‘.pdf’ format.

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  def show
    @object = Object.find(params[:id])
    respond_to do |format|
      format.pdf do
        send_data(render(:template => 'objects/show.pdf.prawn', :layout => false),
          :filename => "#{object.name}.pdf",
          :type => 'application/pdf',
          :disposition => 'attachment')
      end
    end
  end

  def index
    @objects = Object.all
    respond_to do |format|
      format.pdf do
        send_data(render(:template => 'objects/index.pdf.prawn', :layout => false),
          :filename => "objects.pdf",
          :type => 'application/pdf',
          :disposition => 'attachment')
      end
    end
  end

Everything is separated where it needs to be. All the view logic is in the views, model logic is in the models, and controller logic isn’t duplicated elsewhere.

Make sure and check out the various Prawn examples and do your next PDF generation right.

 
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The Path to Rails 3: Greenfielding new apps with the Rails 3 beta

Posted by admin on Feb 9, 2010 in rails, ruby

Upgrading applications is good sport and all, but everyone knows that greenfielding is where the real fun is. At least, I love greenfielding stuff a lot more than dealing with old ghetto cruft that has 1,900 test failures and 300 errors, 20,000 line controllers, and code that I’m pretty sure is actually a demon-brand of PHP.

Building a totally new app in Rails 3 is relatively simple especially if you’ve done it in previous Rails versions, but there a few changes that can trip you up. In the interest of not missing a step someone may need, this post is a simple walkthrough of building a new app with Rails 3.

via omgbloglol – The Path to Rails 3: Greenfielding new apps with the Rails 3 beta.

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