no whodunnit in rspec feature test using paper trail

Question

Using Paper Trail, I've built a change tracking element to my app. Works great in production. One aspect is that it uses the 'whodunnit' field to pull the user name to show which user made the change.

I've looked at the documentation (https://github.com/airblade/paper_trail) and I see the notation about rspec and whodunnit, but I didn't think the reference meant the 'whodunnit' field is not available, only that it would be nil'ed between tests.

Details: I'm using the test helper for rspec, and I have the rspec feature test setup with

"..., versioning: true do"

Moreover, in debugging while running the test, I can see all the other fields for the event/change are there and saved in the database, only whodunnit is not being saved. Interestingly, I'm only having problems in test; no problems in production, works fine there, just doesn't work in test. And of course, I have

before_action :set_paper_trail_whodunnit

set (in my application controller, not the specific controller, but I moved it just to see if it makes a difference, and unsurprisingly, it doesn't).

EDIT: I should have mentioned that I checked to confirm that there is a column 'whodunnit' in the test database while the tests are running. Also, there is a method current_user (as expected, otherwise it would not work in production) available in the controller.

Answer 1

I found this from a PaperTrail issue on Github

Unless you are running controller and / or integration specs prior to running your query it's likely that the whodunnit column is not being populated.

I ended up manually setting my whodunnit in my specs with

PaperTrail.controller_info[:whodunnit] = user.id

which kind of feels like defeats the purpose a little. But I'm running this in a unit spec vs a feature spec, so I think that's the only way to go.