What is the best practice for testing Models in Rails?

Question

How much or how little should one test models in rails? Since the framework is basically doing so much for you, I'm wondering if it's worth testing the generated activerecord methods to make sure they work or not.

Do you guys test them implicitly through the controllers?

In the Java world, if I used Hibernate, I had to write so much ORM mapping stuff that testing save/delete/find for each entity was VERY important - even if I just inherited these methods from a base class - because it was easily possible to get the mapping information wrong, or make a silly mistake. Deletes were important to test to make sure Hibernate would cascade properly.

But since you don't configure any of this stuff in rails at all... it's just so simple... is it worth testing, or do you just assume it works? Do you just limit yourself to maybe making sure associations work as expected?

What is the best practice? Any good testing examples? I found a page here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/testing.html

But it didn't talk specifically about ActiveRecord. It focused more on controllers and other things.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I don't try to test any methods introduced by active record and such. They are already tested by the rails team. And they already have written test cases.

but i would test all my methods and basically any custom code that i write in my models. First to test them as individual units i will use unit tests. And to make sure the whole thing works (models controllers..etc) you can use integration tests.

the railsguides would be a very good starting point for you. afterwards you can digg in to more interesting stuff. i would recommend you to take a look and rspec and cucumber.

• Cucumber
• Rspec

Some more stackoverflow questions (and answers) that would be helpful to you

• Getting Started with RSpec - Looking for tutorials
• What is Unit test, Integration Test, Smoke test, Regression Test?