March 27, 2014

Done With Week 4 of Course 3 at Tealeaf Academy

We covered a whole lot this week, I learned quite a few new things. A few things stood out however.

Testing non-standard models with Shoulda matchers in RSpec

So this week we added some social networking features. We added the ability for users to follow other users. So one user is a follower and the other user is the leader in the way we set it up. To accomplish this we set up a Relationship model to keep track of these leader/follower relationships. This is what that model looks like:

class Relationship < ActiveRecord::Base
      belongs_to :follower, class_name: "User"
      belongs_to :leader, class_name: "User"

      validates_uniqueness_of :follower_id, scope: [:leader_id]
    end

The user model then needed these lines to get the connection set up:

has_many :following_relationships, class_name: "Relationship", foreign_key: :follower_id
  has_many :leading_relationships, class_name: "Relationship", foreign_key: :leader_id

I had to dig around a bit in the excellent Shoulda README to figure out how to test these models that don’t really fit the default Rails behavior.

Here is my spec for the Relationships model

require 'spec_helper'
    describe Relationship do
      it { should belong_to(:follower).class_name('User') }
      it { should belong_to(:leader).class_name('User') }
      it { should validate_uniqueness_of(:follower_id).scoped_to(:leader_id) }
    end

And the relevant parts of my User Model spec:

it { should have_many(:following_relationships).class_name("Relationship").with_foreign_key('follower_id') }
  it { should have_many(:leading_relationships).class_name("Relationship").with_foreign_key('leader_id') }

So, this week really got me to dive deeper into Rails models. How they work, and how to properly test them.

Set host in test environment config for mail tests

This week we also got introduced to mailers and how to test them. Most of it was straight-forward. However, a source of frustration for me involved urls in the email view templates.

In order to point a link in an email to your site, you have to specify the host. The way we did this in our development environment was to add this line to the config/environments/development.rb file:

config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { host: 'localhost:3000' }

That works great for playing around with the UI, but when I was trying to run tests I kept getting errors telling me to specify a host. The problem is that you need to add that line to the config/environments/test.rb file as well. This is pretty obvious looking back, but it took me a little while to figure that out, so if anyone else runs into that issue, that’s how you fix it :).

Resetting the password

This week we also learned how to implement a pretty advanced feature, allowing the user to reset their password. It was really awesome to learn how to implement something like this. Everyday I am getting more and more confident in my ability to build a full-fledged production-quality app.