Rails - May 2006 - Agile Rails (1st edition), depot TDD "exercise"

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I''ve been working my way through the Agile book and just completed  
the depot sample application. I learned quite a bit along the way.

On page 171 we are led through the creation of a test (that fails)  
for new code. The new code (a search function) is left as an exercise  
for the reader. Well, I think I solved it but I''m not sure I did it  
right (even though it passes the test).

After much experimentation, here''s what I did:

1. Edit the depot/app/controller/search_controller.rb file:

class SearchController < ApplicationController

   def search
     @query = String.new(params[:query])
     @products = Product.find(:all,
                               :conditions => "title like
''%#{@query}
%'' OR
                                 description like
''%#{@query}%''")

     flash[:notice] = "Found #{@products.size} product(s)."
   end

end

2. cp depot/app/views/layout/store.rhtml depot/app/views/layout/ 
search.rhtml

3. cp depot/app/views/store/index.rhtml depot/app/views/search/ 
search.rhtml

4. Edit depot/app/views/search/search.rhtml
Add in another set of <div> tags around it so we have <div  
class="results"> as the outermost one. It now looks like:

<div class="results">
<% @products.each do |product| %>
   <div class="catalogentry">
       <img src="<%= product.image_url %>"/>
       <h3><%= h product.title %></h3>
       <%= product.description %>
       <span class="catalogprice"><%=
fmt_dollars(product.price) %></
span>
       <%= link_to ''Add to Cart'',
                   {:action   => ''add_to_cart'', :id =>
product },
                   :class => ''addtocart'' %><br/>
   </div>
   <div class="separator">&nbsp;</div>
<% end %>
</div>

<%= link_to "Show my cart", :action => "display_cart"
%>

5. Change the test so it does "assert_template
''search/search''"
instead of "assert_template ''search/results''".

6. There is no step six.

Was there a better or easier way of accomplishing this task?

Also, why did the book want to test "assert_template ''search/ 
results''"? That seems like an error to me. The default view for a
controller''s method (action) has the same name as the action, right?  
Unless you do a "redirect_to :action =>
''results''" in which case the
"assert_response :success" would now fail because we are redirecting  
to a page with a different name. This really confused me and caused  
me to flail around much longer than necessary to solve this problem.

Or is the test correct and I can have an action named "search"  
rendered by a view named "results"?

cr

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (Darwin)

iD8DBQFEW9yFtEOEsNMQp04RAnLJAJ9KltH+wGA1jp4Fc+SQMUaCoDiccACeK7dM
UPIxhl1BUNhanuih2h0mHJU=fk43
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

OK, so I had to do a couple of more installs of Rails on two new servers 
today.  I realized that my notes were incomplete because I made a couple 
of mistakes in the process.  So, I''ve updated my wiki page with more 
infomation on what I did to get this to work.  These troubleshooting hints 
that I added should be a fairly good guide to correcting some of the most 
common FastCGI and Apache problems that you can encounter on any distro.

http://railswiki.involution.com/

Tony