Wapcaplet

August 2, 2009 Adam Milligan

Imagine for a moment that you run a big, important company. It’s important to you that your big, important company be successful at promoting, manufacturing, and distributing your big, important product, so you have decreed that the company must show a profit each and every quarter. In fact, your internal accounting software enforces this. For example:

describe "QuarterlyReportsController#create" do
  it "should reject quarterly reports that show a net loss" do
    post :create, :quarterly_report => { :net => -100 }
    response.response_code.should == 400
  end
end

Ignoring the somewhat misguided domain requirements, this test is wrong because it probably won’t fail when it should. It’s an example of a problem in Rails controller testing that bites everyone sooner or later.

The problem is that HTTP requests don’t send their parameters as integers, or booleans, or Date objects. No, HTTP request parameters are just big piles of strings. Rails does a good job of hiding the process of converting these strings into the integers and booleans and Date objects that make sense in your domain, but ActiveRecord handles that little bit of sleight of hand (using the column types from your database schema), not ActionController.

So, when you execute that test up above, the value of params[:quarterly_report][:net] will be the integer value -100, which is a value that the controller will never receive from a real HTTP request. This test fails to test a real case.

Now, if you try to use this value as an integer, either in the controller or by overriding #net= in the model, the test will still pass. But, as soon as you send a real request to the controller (hopefully not in production) you’ll find yourself on the business end of a 500 response. The test is broken.

In order to prevent this sort of brokenness I wrote a small patch to Rails (available here), which was summarily, and I will admit not unexpectedly, rejected. After that, I turned the patch into a tiny plugin called Wapcaplet (available here). It simply checks the parameters you pass to functional tests, and throws a friendly exception if you pass something with an inappropriate type. It accepts strings and instances of TestUploadFile in all cases. For parameter that Rails uses for routing it will also accept subclasses of ActiveRecord::Base.

Some examples:

# POST users/
post :create, :user => { :likes_ice_cream => true } # BOOM
post :create, :user => { :likes_ice_cream => "1" } # OK

post :create, :user => { :best_friend => @other_user } #BOOM
post :create, :user => { :best_friend_id => @other_user.id } # BOOM
post :create, :user => { :best_friend_id => @other_user.id.to_s } #OK

# GET users/:id
get :show, :id => @user.id # BOOM
get :show, :id => @user.to_param # OK
get :show, :id => @user # OK

# PUT users/:user_id/profile
put :update,
  :user_id => @user,
  :profile => { :photo => File.open("some/file" } # BOOM
put :update,
  :user_id => @user,
  :profile => { :photo => fixture_file_upload("some/file", "image/jpg" } #OK

Incidentally, notice that this will catch the pathological case, which seems to afflict every Rails developer, in which you pass #id rather than #to_param for a routing parameter.

In anticipation of the misguided comments that I know will come, no, it would not be better to have the plugin (or patch) call #to_s or #to_param on every incoming parameter to functional tests. Consider the example of boolean values:

true.to_s # => "true"
false.to_s # => "false"
true.to_param # => true
false.to_param # => false

Neither #to_s nor #to_param return a value likely to appear in a real HTTP request. It doesn’t take much imagination to come up with other examples of types that would not convert to meaningful request values. Worse, it takes only a little more imagination to come up with a scenario in which the implicit string conversion in the test would create subtlely wrong behavior that would be an enormous pain to track down.

So, take Wapcaplet out for a spin, I hope it saves you some time. Special thanks to Parker for getting bit by this problem enough times to get angry and demand I fix it.

About the Author

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