Ruby-on-rails – How to get cucumber and databasecleaner to leave the seed data in the rails test db

cucumberruby-on-rails

I have several database tables that have data that is for display purposes only, it never changes. It takes a long time to load all the seed data. I am using cucumber which seems to use the database_cleaner gem before each scenario to truncate all the tables in the test db. Is there a way to tell database_cleaner or cucumber to leave a few tables alone or am i stuck with loading my seed data before every scenario?
I am running
rails 2.3.8
cucumber 0.10.0
cucumber-rails 0.3.2
database_cleaner 0.50.0
Any help is much appreciated.
Tom

Best Answer

If you are using ActiveRecord or DataMapper you should be able to use the :transaction strategy instead of :truncation.

DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction

Or as @traday points out, you can use an exclusion list with truncation.

DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation, {:except => %w[widgets]}

The DatabaseCleaner docs are worth reading. Look in features/support/env.rb for where this is typically set up with Cucumber.

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Ruby-on-rails – Rails: How to rename a database column in a Ruby on Rails migration

rename_column :table, :old_column, :new_column

You'll probably want to create a separate migration to do this. (Rename FixColumnName as you will.):

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Then edit the migration to do your will:

# db/migrate/xxxxxxxxxx_fix_column_name.rb
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For Rails 3.1 use:

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See "Active Record Migrations" for more information.

rails g migration FixColumnName

class FixColumnName < ActiveRecord::Migration
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If you happen to have a whole bunch of columns to rename, or something that would have required repeating the table name over and over again:

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You could use change_table to keep things a little neater:

class FixColumnNames < ActiveRecord::Migration
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      t.rename :old_column2, :new_column2
      ...
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end

Then just db:migrate as usual or however you go about your business.

For Rails 4:

While creating a Migration for renaming a column, Rails 4 generates a change method instead of up and down as mentioned in the above section. The generated change method is:

$ > rails g migration ChangeColumnName

which will create a migration file similar to:

class ChangeColumnName < ActiveRecord::Migration
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