Ruby-on-rails – Rspec Mocking: ActiveRecord::AssociationTypeMismatch

activerecordmockingrspecruby-on-railsruby-on-rails-3

I'm new to Rspec and trying to set up a test for a User Profile. Profile belongs_to User.

Now, I have an API integration with a third party site that works through the User Model, but some of the information for that API link is contained in Profile, so I have an "after_update" filter on Profile that tells the parent user to save, which triggers an update of the API.

I'm trying to write a test for this, and I'm getting an ActiveRecord::AssociationTypeMismatch. The reason is I'm using a mock user, but I'm trying to test that when Profile is updated it sends :save to User. Plus, the User model has an email confirmation process and the afformentioned API calls in it's create process, so it really isn't ideal to actually create a user just to test this out.

Here's my test:

it "should save the parent user object after it is saved" do
    user = double('user', :save => true )
    profile = Profile.create( :first_name => 'John', :last_name => 'Doe' )
    profile.user = user

    user.should_receive(:save)
end

So, clearly the ActiveRecord error is being caused by trying to associate a mock user with a profile that expects a real user to be associated.

My question is, how do you avoid this kind of problem in writing rails tests? All I want this test to do is make sure Profile calls :save on it's parent User. Is there a smarter way to do this, or a workaround for the ActiveRecord error?

Thanks!

Best Answer

You should be able to use a mock_model for this:

it "should save the parent user object after it is saved" do
  user = mock_model(User)
  user.should_receive(:save).and_return(true)
  profile = Profile.create( :first_name => 'John', :last_name => 'Doe' )
  profile.user = user
end
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