rspec

Back in August we talked about adding the ability to turn off DB access for certain types of example groups in rspec_on_rails:

http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/r...

The idea was that whenever someone tried to hit the DB under a group that had it turned off an exception would be raised.

I decided to revisit the problem and attempt a patch because the functionality would be very useful at my company so developers are yelled at with they attempt to use real models in a layer we have decided should be primarily interaction-based.

Anyways, I have finally put together the beginning of a patch, with documentation and all:

http://github.com/bmabey/rspec-r...

It is not quite there yet though. If you look at my comments you'll see I'm not too happy with the way I am caching my columns. I cache it by allowing a connection to go through once to get the column names. UnitRecord solves this problem by inspecting the schema.rb file. So we could do that but I thought I should throw it for discussion before I wasted any more time. :)

I also said that mock_model was problematic. I somewhat take that back.. The only places where it causes a problem is when the model being mocked has some DB calls in the class definition, like so:

class Thing < AR::Base

@@names = find(:all).map(&:name)

....

end

(Because by using the model's constant rails will load it into memory.)

This surprised me at first and I thought by patch was faulty but after thinking about it I think that this should be the desired behaviour. This will let the developer know that their seemingly harmless view spec is actually hitting the DB when mock_model is called on such a model which could slow them down a lot. The problem can easily be resolved in most cases by refactoring the call into a lazy one that is then cached. This is probably best practice anyways.

Also, if that was too much of a problem for certain models db access could be turned on explicitly for that example group.

Anyways, I'm looking for feedback on the patch. And if you want to accept it please let me know any changes you would like me to make.

Thanks,

Ben

p.s. Sorry for such the long post...