Turn off transactional fixtures for one spec with RSpec 2

Question

How do I turn off transactional fixtures for only one spec (or Steak scenario) with RSpec 2? I tried some things found on the web without any success.

This leads to an undefined method exception.

describe "MyClass without transactional fixtures" do
  self.use_transactional_fixtures = false
  ...
end

This simply does nothing (transactional fixture is still on):

describe "MyClass without transactional fixtures" do
  RSpec.configure do |config|
    config.use_transactional_fixtures = false
  end
  ...
end

What else could I try?

Answer 1

I usually add a helper like this:

def without_transactional_fixtures(&block)
  self.use_transactional_fixtures = false

  before(:all) do
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
  end

  yield

  after(:all) do
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction
  end
end

Which lets me turn off transactional fixtures for a specific block in the specs:

describe "doing my thing" do
  without_transactional_fixtures do
    it "does something without transaction fixtures" do
      ...
    end
  end
end

Answer 2

This used to be a bug (see ticket #197), but I seems to be okay now. I just don't know if it will work on a per test base (probably not). If you want to do this, you can disable transactional fixtures globally by putting config.use_transactional_fixtures = false on the spec_helper.rb and use DatabaseCleaner to set that.

I've had a similar problem when testing pages with javascript on the browser (a scenario that does not work with transactional fixtures). Here's how I managed to work around it: http://github.com/lailsonbm/contact_manager_app

Answer 3

I've did it this way, with database_cleaner, in order to test code that uses transactions (which will conflict with transactional_fixtures or any other strategy to make transactional tests e.g. DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation or :transaction):

# spec_helper.rb
config.use_transactional_fixtures = false
config.around(:each, :testing_transactions => true) do |ex|
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = nil
    ex.run
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
end

and in my test cases:

it "should not save if one of objects are invalid", :testing_transactions => true