Unknown Method key? error in Rails 2.3.8 Unit testing

Question

I was writing unit tests for my models for a while. After that I was tweaking around and again continued writing unit tests.

Earlier all my unit tests were working - successfully. But now WHen I run them, it gives me

Loaded suite unit/post_test
Started
EEEE
Finished in 0.112698 seconds.

  1) Error:
test_presence_of_body(PostTest):
NoMethodError: undefined method `key?' for #<String:0x103519a88>


  2) Error:
test_presence_of_body_and_title(PostTest):
NoMethodError: undefined method `key?' for #<String:0x1034dd420>


  3) Error:
test_presence_of_title(PostTest):
NoMethodError: undefined method `key?' for #<String:0x1034af750>


  4) Error:
test_title_minimum_width_3(PostTest):
NoMethodError: undefined method `key?' for #<String:0x103481a80>

And my test cases are

class PostTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase


  def test_presence_of_title
    post = Post.new(:body=>"Some content")
    assert !post.save,"Saved post without title"
  end


  def test_presence_of_body
    post = Post.new(:title=>"Some title")
    assert !post.save,"saved post without body"
  end


  def test_presence_of_body_and_title
    post = Post.new(:title=>"Some title",:body=>"")
    assert !post.save,"Saved Post without body"

    post = Post.new(:title => "",:body=>"Some body")
    assert !post.save,"Saved Post without title"

    post = Post.new(:title =>"",:body=>"")
    assert !post.save,"Saved Post with title and body"


  end


  def test_title_minimum_width_3
    post1 = Post.new(:title=>"a",:body=>"This will not be saved")
    assert !post1.save,"Saved post with title length less than 3"

    post2 = Post.new(:title=>"abcd",:body=>"This will be saved")
    assert post2.save,"Couldnot save a valid post record"

    post3 = Post.new(:title=>"abc",:body=>"This will be saved")
    assert post3.save,"Could not save a valid record"
  end
end

Answer 1

If it was working and now it is not, I would say that you might have introduced some kind of error in your post model. It is difficult to say without a backtrace and code from your post model, but if you were to run the same code in your console, do you get the same error?

post = Post.new(:body=>"Some content")
post.save

From there you should get a backtrace and a place to hunt the error down.

EDIT:

Next I would try running rake with the --trace flag to get a backtrace.

The other thought I had was that it might be something monkey patching assert. I don't see anything about test unit changing assert method to take a hash as the second argument.

first, go into your console and type, assert false, "error message" and you should get a no method error. If you get another response, then you need to find where the assert method might be, otherwise - try with this:

require 'test/unit'
include Test::Unit::Assertions
assert false, "error message"

You should see:

Test::Unit::AssertionFailedError: this is a message.
<false> is not true.

Otherwise, I would also try removing the message at the end of your assert and see if you get the same error.