Category: Ruby

When writing custom validators like described in the Rails guide on validations it’s good practice to write tests for them so you are sure they work as intended. Let’s take a look at the custom validator example shown in that Rails guide:

class EmailValidator < ActiveModel::EachValidator
  def validate_each(record, attribute, value)
    unless value =~ /\A([^@\s]+)@((?:[-a-z0-9]+\.)+[a-z]{2,})\z/i
      record.errors.add attribute, (options[:message] || "is not an email")
    end
  end
end

The above validator will validate attributes against a regular expression to see if the value is a valid email address, if it is not a valid email address the error “is not an email” is added to the errors for that attribute.

You can test the validator by working with a test model class inside your test like so:

require "test_helper"

class EmailValidatorTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
  class TestModel
    include ActiveModel::Model

    attr_accessor :email

    validates :email, email: true
  end

  test "recognizes a valid email address" do
    test_object = TestModel.new(email: "mark@without-brains.net")

    assert test_object.valid?
  end

  test "fails validation for an invalid email address" do
    test_object = TestModel.new(email: "no-email")

    refute test_object.valid?
    assert_equal ["is not an email"], test_object.errors[:email]
  end
end

By defining the TestModel class inside the test it will actually be named EmailValidatorTest::TestModel preventing clashes with other tests.

If you want to try the above code in a Rails project you can save the files as app/validators/email_validator.rb and test/validators/email_validator_test.rb respectively and then run the tests.

Using modules to share code between classes in Ruby is a commonly used method to add re-usable behaviour without blocking the inheritance chain, the Rails ActiveSupport::Concern adds some convenience methods to do so. What (at least in my opinion) should not be forgotten is to test the usage of such modules on your classes, this can actually be achieved fairly easily creating a module with test code that you can then again include in your tests.

Take this very contrived example module which adds an instance method to the classes it is included in:

module ReverseName  
  def reversed_name 
    name.reverse    
  end               
end                 

It’s function could be tested with the following test:

test 'reverse name' do                             
  assert_equal 'htimS nhoJ', @name_reversable.reversed_name 
end                                                

This can be poured into a module using ActiveSupport::Concern that can be included in test cases of other classes like so:

module Concerns                                          
  module ReverseNameTest                                 
    include ActiveSupport::Concern                       
                                                         
    included do                                          
      test 'reverse name' do                             
        assert_equal 'htimS nhoJ', @name_reversable.reversed_name 
      end                                                
    end                                                  
  end                                                    
end                                                      

In Rails projects I usually put shared test code inside the directory test/test_helpers, to have these loaded when running tests you will have to add the following line to your test_helper.rb:

Dir[Rails.root.join('test/test_helpers/**/*.rb')].sort
                                                 .each { |file| require file }

To now use this test module on a class that can make use of it we can include the test module in that model’s test like so:

require 'test_helper'                                             
                                                                  
class ContactTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase                       
  include Concerns::ReverseNameTest                               
                                                                  
  setup do                                                        
    @name_reversable = Contact.new(first_name: 'John', last_name: 'Smith') 
  end                                                             
                                                                  
  test 'name' do                                                  
    contact = Contact.new(first_name: 'John', last_name: 'Smith') 
    assert_equal 'John Smith', contact.name                       
  end                                                             
end                                                               

If you want to verify that the test gets executed for your model you can purposely break the test(s) to see them fail like shown below:

Pushing execution of code that take a long time to complete to ActiveJob can be great to increase the (feeling of) responsiveness for any Rails application. Sometimes it can be desirable to run triggered jobs inline instead though (in certain rake tasks for example), you can do this by overriding the queue adapter with the inline adapter like so:

ActiveJob::Base.queue_adapter = ActiveJob::QueueAdapters::InlineAdapter.new

If you want to ensure that the adapter is switched back to its original setting after you are done (because more code is executed around the part where you want to run the jobs inline) you can that using ensure like in the below example rake task:

desc 'My rake task'
task my_task: :environment do
  old_queue_adapter = ActiveJob::Base.queue_adapter
  ActiveJob::Base.queue_adapter = ActiveJob::QueueAdapters::InlineAdapter.new
  # your code here
ensure
  ActiveJob::Base.queue_adapter = old_queue_adapter
end

Note that if you are using different queueing backends for specific jobs (as documented in the Rails guide here) you would have to override each one of those too in the same way (if you would want to run those inline that is).

Single table inheritance (often referenced to as STI) is a feature offered by Rails’s ActiveRecord (which is documented here) that allows you to subclass models to store data for multiple similar models in one database table. This can be a very useful feature under the right circumstances.

When working with Rails in development mode classes are not preloaded (unlike is done in production mode). If you use the descendants method to get a list of the subtypes of your model (to for example display them or to populate a select box) it is possible that sometimes an empty or partial list is returned rather than a list of all the defined subtypes (unless you have actually used one of them so far).

If you are working in a team this can be an especially devious little problem that can linger for a long time. Different developers may have different sets of data in their development system. Loading a list of STI models will load the subtype classes making them available in the application from that point on. If the database however does not contain records for the subtype’s class and you are not directly referencing it you will not see it. This can then result in one developer experiencing issues while the another does not.

In this article I will demonstrate the issue and offer a solution that you can implement.

Continue reading “Rails: ActiveRecord descendants in development mode”