When you need to store structured data (like Ruby hashes) in a single database column with ActiveRecord, a simple way is to use PostgreSQL's jsonb columns. ActiveRecord will automatically serialize and deserialize your Hash to and from JSON, and you can index JSON paths for fast reads.

As an alternative, ActiveRecord::Store offers a way to store hashes in a single database column. This card will show you how to migrate those hashes in an ActiveRecord::Migration by example:
...

After loading a staging dump into development, you might get an ActiveRecord::EnvironmentMismatchError when trying to replace the database (like rails db:drop, rails db:schema:load).

$ rails db:drop
rails aborted!
ActiveRecord::EnvironmentMismatchError: You are attempting to modify a database that was last run in `staging` environment.
You are running in `development` environment. If you are sure you want to continue, first set the environment using:

        bin/rails db:environment:set RAILS_ENV=development

Starting with R...

When you click a link or a press a button on a Selenium-controlled browser, the call will return control to your test before the next page is loaded. This can lead to concurrency issues when a Cucumber step involves a Selenium action and a Ruby call which both change the same resources.

Take the following step which signs in a user through the browser UI and then sets a flag on the user that was just signed in:

Given /^the user "([^"]*)" signed in (\d) days ago$/ do |name, days|
  visit new_session_path
  fill_in 'Username', :w...

When you need to patch an existing gem, one way is to "vendor" the gem by copying it into the vendor/gems directory of your Rails project. You can then make any changes you require and Rails will use the vendored version of the gem after a server restart. Unfortunately you need to perform some additional steps to marry Rails and the copied gem. This notes describes what to do.

With Bundler

This is super-painful. If you just copy the gem to vendor/gems, Rails will complain:

Unpacked gem foolib in vendor/gems has no s...

The Rails logger will store its content in a buffer and write it into the file system every 1000 lines. This will come back to bite you when using Rails.logger.info to write log output during Rake tasks or on a production console.

You often won't notice this because for the development and test environments auto_flushing is set to write after each line. On production environments the Rails logger writes only every 1000 lines -- and not upon shell or script ter...

Consul 0.9 comes with many new features to optimize powers that only check access to a given record. e.g. Power.current.post?(Post.last). See below for details.

Powers that only check a given object

Sometimes it is not convenient to define powers as a collection. Sometimes you only want to store a method that
checks whether a given object is accessible.

To do so, simply define a power that ends in a question mark:

class Power
  ...

  power :upd...

There are many approaches out there how you can import data from a legacy application to a new application. Here is an approach which opens two database connections and uses active record for the legacy system, too:

1. Add you database information to you config/database.yml.

data_migration:
  database: your_application_data_migration

2. Create a separate application record for the data migration, e.g. in app/data_migration/migration_record.rb. You will need to create an app/data_migration.rb class first.

class DataMig...

When you have two inputs, where one contains the name of the other (eg. Name and Name with special treatment), Capybara's fill_in method will fail with the following message:

Ambiguous match, found 2 elements matching visible field "Name" that is not disabled (Capybara::Ambiguous)

You can force Capybara to match exactly what you are typing (which makes your tests better anyways) with match: :prefer_exact:

name = 'Name'
value = 'Bettertest Cucumberbatch'
fill_in(field, with: value, match: :prefer_exact)

Furthermore...

Spreewald gives you the <step> within <selector> meta step that will constrain page inspection to a given scope.

Unfortunately, this does not work with RSS feeds, as they're XML documents and not valid when viewed from Capybara's internal browser (e.g. a <link> tag cannot have content in HTML).

Inspecting XML

If you're inspecting XML that is invalid in HTML, you need to inspect the page source instead of the DOM. You may use Spreewald's "... in the HTML" meta step, or add this proxy step fo...

Firefox 5.0.1, which we were using for most Rails 2.3 projects, does not run on Ubuntu 14.04 any more. Here is how to update affected projects.

1. Update (or create) .firefox-version with the content: 24.0
   If you haven't installed Firefox 24 yet, the next time you run tests with Geordi, it will tell you how to install it.

2. On a Rails 2 project:

   • Update your Cucumber-related gems as described in Upgrading Cucumber and Capybara, including cucumber_spinner and launchy.

   • If you...

Some helpers for poking around at your Capybara driven browser's cookies in integration tests.

Supports Capybara's bundled drivers (rack-test, Selenium Webdriver), and adapters for other drivers may be added.

Cerberus is a lightweight and easy-to-use Continuous Builder software for Ruby. It could be run periodically from a scheduler and check if application tests are broken. In case of failed tests Cerberus sends notification to developers.

It turned out that the test subject didn't know that longdesc even existed before the tester told him about it. Can you blame him?

Rake tasks to run specs and tests in parallel, to use multiple CPUs and speedup test runtime.

Mockito is a mocking framework that tastes really good. It lets you write beautiful tests with clean & simple API. Mockito doesn't give you hangover because the tests are very readable and they produce clean verification errors.

RESTClient is a Java application to test RESTful webservices. It can be used to test variety of HTTP communications.

Test spies are a form of test double that preserves the normal four-phase unit

In specs, the session never persists but is always a new object for each request. Data put into the session in a previous request is lost. Here is how to circumvent that.

What's going on?

You are making ActionController::TestRequests in your specs, and their #initialize method does this:

self.session = TestSession.new

This means that each time you say something like "get :index", the session in your controller will just be a new one, and you won't see ...

Using this gem I could get JSON generation from a large, nested Ruby hash down from 200ms to 2ms.

Its behavior differs from the default JSON.dump or to_json behavior in that it serializes Ruby symbols as ":symbol", and that it doesn't like an ActiveSupport::HasWithIndifferentAccess.

There are also some issues if you are on Rails < 4.1 and want it to replace #to_json (but you can always just call Oj.dump explicitely).

Security warning: Oj does not escape HTML entities in JSON
---------...

Note that if you plan to downgrade Firefox because your Selenium tests broke after a Firefox upgrade, there is a better way that doesn't involve downgrading. Mozilla has stated that they will no longer provide security patches for any but the most recent versions of Firefox. So running an old Firefox should not be a long-term solution for anything.

If you still want to downgrade your Firefox for other reasons, here is how I downgra...

Accessing pseudo elements via JavaScript or jQuery is often painful/impossible. However, accessing their styles is fairly simple.

Using getComputedStyle

First, find the element in question.

let element = document.querySelector('.my-element') // or $('.my-element').get(0) when using jQuery

Next, use JavaScript's getComputedStyle. It takes an optional 2nd argument to filter for pseudo elements.

let style = window.getComputedStyle(element, '::before')
let color = style.getPropertyValue('background-color...

The will_paginate gem will show a default of 30 records per page.
If you want to test pagination in a Cucumber feature, you don't want to create 31 records just for that.

Instead, you probably want to modify the number of items shown, by saying something like this:

Given we paginate after 2 users

Using the following step definition, you now can! :)

require 'cucumber/rspec/doubles'

Given /^paginate after (\d+) (.*)$/ do |per_page, model_name|
  model = model_name.singularize.gsub(/...

I got this error when running Rails 2.3 tests for Rails LTS. More stacktrace:

NoMethodError: undefined method `cache' for Gem:Module
    /vagrant/rails-2-3-lts-repository/railties/lib/rails_generator/lookup.rb:212:in `each'
    /vagrant/rails-2-3-lts-repository/railties/lib/rails_generator/lookup.rb:146:in `to_a'
    /vagrant/rails-2-3-lts-repository/railties/lib/rails_generator/lookup.rb:146:in `cache'
    /opt/vagrant_ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:243:in `inject'
    /vagrant/rails-2-3-lts-repository/railties/l...