This week, I file my first major complaint with Rails.

I was innocently running tests and tweakings some views – when I discovered function that should work longer did.

A little background, my app is filled with routes the make the URLs more contextually appropriate and memorable than the standard REST URL construction. If you have any Rails experience – you can see the problem with using the link_to helper

Rails likes to turn this:
< %= link_to 'Edit', :controller => 'items', :action => 'edit', :id => '1' %>
into this:
/items/1/edit

Now my standard routes are more like this:
/name_of_item_1/edit

If I do something like this, consistent with how my routes are structured:
< %= link_to 'Edit', :controller => 'items', :action => 'edit', :item_name => 'name_of_item_1' %>
link_to doesn’t pick up the item_name. If I throw other variables into the mix, say to pre-pop some attributes, link_to grabs it’s 3 perferred variables and forgets the rest.

Makes me feel like link_to is a lot like scaffolding: great for getting things up and running quickly, but something you want to clear out once you get serious.

So, you’ve set up your Rails app to present different views to authenticated people verses non. Now, how do you test functionality for the authenticated people?

Seems silly to have your tests sign in before checking whatever it is you want them to check.

Well, pass the session data in the test as a hash. Turns out the action tests are formatted like this:
method :action, {action variables hash}, {session variables hash}
Pretty straight-forward, except the session variables need to be passed as ‘strings’, not :symbols.
This works:
post :add_member, {:email => 'test@test.com', :group => '1'}, {'person_id' => '1'}

This doesn’t
post :add_member, {:email => 'test@test.com', :group => '1'}, {:person_id => '1'}

A less than intuitive distinction that I’ve bumped into before with cookies

Also a big thanks to Jon @ Ruby Nuggets for the tip passing referers info in the tests:
@request.env['HTTP_REFERER'] = 'http://foo'
not the @request.referer = ‘http://foo’ that I assumed.