are fixtures loaded when using the sql dump to create a test database

Question

Because of some non standard table creation options I am forced to use the sql dump instead of the standard schema.rb (i.e. I have uncommented this line in the environment.rb config.active_record.schema_format = :sql). I have noticed that when I use the sql dump that my fixtures do not seem to be loaded into the database. Some data is loaded into it but, I am not sure where it is coming from. Is this normal? and if it is normal can anybody tell me where this other data is coming from?

Answer 1

This is a very old question but even almost 10 years later, the answer is still the same - it seems that fixtures ignore the schema format and are hard-coded to look for YAML files. Here's the Rake task as of Rails 5.2-stable:

https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/5-2-stable/activerecord/lib/active_record/railties/databases.rake#L198

Line 214 uses Dir["#{fixtures_dir}/**/*.yml"] to find files, so only .yml will be read.

Solutions revolve around loading your SQL fixtures into an otherwise empty database, then dumping them as YAML using the yaml_db gem or something such as that described in this blog post. Since links to blog posts often die quite quickly, I've replicated the source below:

namespace :db do
  desc 'Convert development DB to Rails test fixtures'
  task to_fixtures: :environment do
    TABLES_TO_SKIP = %w[ar_internal_metadata delayed_jobs schema_info schema_migrations].freeze

    begin
      ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection
      ActiveRecord::Base.connection.tables.each do |table_name|
        next if TABLES_TO_SKIP.include?(table_name)

        conter = '000'
        file_path = "#{Rails.root}/test/fixtures/#{table_name}.yml"
        File.open(file_path, 'w') do |file|
          rows = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.select_all("SELECT * FROM #{table_name}")
          data = rows.each_with_object({}) do |record, hash|
            suffix = record['id'].blank? ? conter.succ! : record['id']
            hash["#{table_name.singularize}_#{suffix}"] = record
          end
          puts "Writing table '#{table_name}' to '#{file_path}'"
          file.write(data.to_yaml)
        end
      end
    ensure
      ActiveRecord::Base.connection.close if ActiveRecord::Base.connection
    end
  end
end

The code above was published on July 16, 2017 by Yi Zeng. You'd put this in a file called something like lib/tasks/to_fixtures.rake. I loaded my SQL fixture data into the otherwise empty/clean test-mode database, then ran RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rake db:to_fixtures. It worked as-is for me under Rails 5.2.3.