Rails fixtures -- how do you set foreign keys?

ruby-on-rails unit-testing testing tdd fixtures
Ethan picture Ethan · Feb 4, 2009 · Viewed 8.6k times · Source

I'm reading about Rails fixtures in this guide (thanks, trevorturk). It appears you define classes in a Yaml file and they're automatically loaded into the test DB -- cool.

But if you want to specify that this recipe belongs to that cookbook (or whatever) how do you do that?

Are you supposed to specify the values for cookbook.id and recipe.cookbook_id by hand in the Yaml code? (Just a guess -- the guide doesn't show anything like that.) Or is there a more suitable way?

Answer

Andrew Vit picture Andrew Vit · Feb 4, 2009

You should use named fixtures, which automatically generate an id number for you where you don't provide one. These id numbers are essentially integer hashes of whatever string you use. Don't add the "_id" if you're referencing the named version:

# recipes.yml
chicken_soup:
  cookbook: my_recipes

# cookbooks.yml
my_recipes:
  title: My Test Cookbook

Related questions

How to run a single test from a rails test suite?

How can I run a single test from a rails test suite? rake test ANYTHING seems to not help.

Read More
Rails - How do you test ActionMailer sent a specific email in tests

Currently in my tests I do something like this to test if an email is queued to be sent assert_difference('ActionMailer::Base.deliveries.size', 1) do get :create_from_spreedly, {:user_id => @logged_in_user.id} end but if …

Read More
RSpec: What is the difference between let and a before block?

What is difference between let and a before block in RSpec? And when to use each? What will be good approach (let or before) in below example? let(:user) { User.make !} let(:account) {user.account.make!} before(:each) do @user = …

Read More