[Rails] Unit tests broken out-of-the-box

[Tim Bates]

I'm using Postgres. The Rakefile that rails hands me calls dropdb and 
createdb to return the test database to a known state (ie empty) before 
it loads in db/production_structure.sql. This forces me to run the tests 
as a user with the authorisation to create new databases (ie postgres). 
I don't want to do this - I've created a test user, who owns the test 
database, and if that database gets dropped e doesn't have the 
permission to recreate it, and I want it to stay that way. Can the 
Rakefile be changed to not destroy the database every time I run the 
tests? This would seem to make sense for a commercial installation too - 
the users wouldn't need superuser privileges to the database to run 
their tests. I'm not sure how existing hosting installations handle this.

Once I resolved this, by (hopefully temporarily) giving Rails superuser 
access to the database, I found that there appears to be a bug in the 
test case generated by new_model.

I called "new_model User" which among other things created 
test/unit/user_test.rb, which contains these lines:

   def setup
     @user = create_fixtures "user"
   end

and also the empty directory test/fixtures/user to match.

`create_fixtures "user"` calls Fixtures.create_fixtures and passes 
"user" as the table name, but because of Rails' rewriting, the table is 
actually called "users", and my test cases die with

   1) Error:
test_something(UserTest):
ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: ERROR:  syntax error at or near "user" 
at character 13
: DELETE FROM user

If I change the line above to
     @user = create_fixtures "users"
and
$ mv test/fixtures/user test/fixtures/users
then the test passes.

Tim.

-- 
Tim Bates
tim at bates.id.au