Editing Functional Tests in Rails

There was a time I was afraid of breaking my code. And then there was a time I was less afraid of breaking my code, but I became obsessed with fixing every little error and bug that I ended up wasting time on something relatively trivial when I could be working on more productive matters.

Case in point:

I've been working through the Depot application with Agile Web Development with Rails. This latest chapter had me working through creating a mailer and writing tests for it. Creating the mailer went well, and I can use my own gmail account to send mail through my Depot application! SUCCESS!

However, I got hung up on the functional tests. And I know what the problem is, but not how to fix it.

Here are the errors I get:

1) Error:
test_should_destroy_line_item(LineItemsControllerTest):
ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound: Couldn't find LineItem with ID=980190962 [WHERE ("line_items".cart_id = 980190963)]
app/controllers/line_items_controller.rb:79:in `destroy'
  test/functional/line_items_controller_test.rb:45:in `test_should_destroy_line_item'
  test/functional/line_items_controller_test.rb:44:in `test_should_destroy_line_item'

2) Error:
test_order_shipped(NotifierTest):
ActionView::Template::Error: undefined method `protect_against_forgery?' for #<#:0x1030519d8>
    app/views/line_items/_line_item.html.erb:9:in `_app_views_line_items__line_item_html_erb___1505233713_2172764620_6072364'
    app/views/notifier/order_shipped.html.erb:8:in `_app_views_notifier_order_shipped_html_erb___2127495373_2172826120_0'
    app/mailers/notifier.rb:13:in `order_shipped'
    test/functional/notifier_test.rb:13:in `test_order_shipped'

I have an idea why I'm getting the first error. I've been following the optional exercises at the end of each chapter and I changed the :destroy method in line_items_controller without updating the functional test. Here's the OFFENSIVE code:

def destroy
  @cart = current_cart
  @line_item = @cart.remove_product(@cart.line_items.find(params[:id]))

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html { redirect_to store_url }
      format.js
      format.xml { head :ok }
    end
  end
end

Any idea how to fix this? I'm not super concerned about it, but I'd like to know if I'm on the right track and I think this would be an easy fix. The second error I'm less sure about. I don't get why I'm getting an error for protect_against_forgery? since I'm not calling that method anywhere. Is it a default Rails thing that I'm overlooking?

Anyway, my current strategy has been simply to comment out the tests until later. Which may never come, depending on a variety of factors! I have a sneaking suspicion writing tests will never be one of my strong suits.

Getting back to my original point, it made more sense simply to comment these tests out rather than spend a bunch of time fixing them, especially since my application DOES work. Still, it's a good idea to get a handle on writing tests. I'm doing this for Future Tyler.

Learning about testing, debugging and optimizing Ruby code

I just finished up chapter 8 in Beginning Ruby. It was mostly about documenting, debugging, testing and optimizing code. Not the most interesting chapter, but it's still important to understand.

Writing custom exceptions is easy enough to understand. Begin and Rescue makes sense. Once again, I'm amazed at how easy Ruby is to grasp. You want Ruby to do something 100 times?

100.times do
  puts "DO WHAT NOW"
end

Maybe it's just because I've got some experience now, but this bit of code is easy to break down. I'm looking forward to the day that more complex bits of code are as easy to grasp! One step at a time.

But here's a question about optimizing code. Do you typically try to optimize as you write the code, or do you write the code and then optimize it? At first, it seemed logical to try and optimize as you write the code, because it seemed like the most efficient way to work. However, once I read further, writing code and then optimizing it seemed more efficient, since you could figure out which parts of your code need to be reworked. This way you wouldn't waste time thinking of ways to optimize code that wasn't really a problem to begin with.

Benchmarking code is another concept that made sense immediately. Since Ruby offers you the ability to do something in multiple ways, being able to figure out if one method is inefficient is important.

Next up is Chapter 9: Files and Databases. OH YEAH! Never thought I'd be so excited to learn how to call a database for information and then manipulate that information and display NEW information to the user! This is what I've been interested in since I started reading Beginning Ruby.