Rails - Jul 2006 - receiving nil exception in rake tests

I''ve been doing some really simple rails testing, going along with 
standard "red light... green light..." back-and-forth-ing.

All of a sudden, rake was reporting that there were "Test failures"
but
not showing any stack trace.  I went into
/usr/local/ruby/.../rails/lib/tasks/testing.rake
and looked at the source that ran the tests.

I found these lines:
---
desc ''Test all units and functionals''
task :test do
  Rake::Task["test:units"].invoke       rescue got_error = true; puts 
''Unit test error: '' + $!.inspect
  Rake::Task["test:functionals"].invoke rescue got_error = true; puts 
''Functional test error: '' + $!.inspect

  if File.exist?("test/integration")
    Rake::Task["test:integration"].invoke rescue got_error = true;
puts
''Integration test error: '' + $!.inspect
  end

  raise "Test failures" if got_error
end
---

The extra statements in the rescue blocks are my own.  That is, I added
; puts ''Unit test...

Running rake again, I now get
''Unit test error: nil''
/usr/local/bin/ruby -Ilib:test 
"/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.7.1/lib/rake/rake_test_loader.rb"
Functional test error: nil
/usr/local/bin/ruby -Ilib:test 
"/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.7.1/lib/rake/rake_test_loader.rb"
Integration test error: nil
rake aborted!
Test failures

Can anybody help me diagnose why these tests are failing?  I can tell 
you that I''m definitely not even getting into any of the test case 
bodies, since they have print statements that aren''t getting executed.

Thanks,
gcn

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

My own further digging, in case it helps others:

I changed the task description to read as follows:

---
desc ''Test all units and functionals''
task :test do
  begin
    Rake::Task["test:units"].invoke
  rescue => err
    got_error = true
    puts "Error in Unit tests: #{err.message}"
  	puts err.backtrace
  end

  begin
    Rake::Task["test:functionals"].invoke
  rescue => err
    got_error = true
    puts "Error in Functional tests: #{err.message}"
  	puts err.backtrace
  end

  if File.exist?("test/integration")
    begin
      Rake::Task["test:integration"].invoke
    rescue => err
      got_error = true
      puts "Error in Integration tests: #{err.message}"
    	puts err.backtrace
    end
  end

  raise "Test failures" if got_error
end
---

there''s probably some DRY-ing to be done on the error printing, but I 
HIGHLY recommend the rails project incorporate this code into the rake 
test task.  (Alas, I can''t submit it now because the rails Trac is 
down.)

My error ended up being something about table duplication, and was 
relatively easy to fix, but I had a very hard time diagnosing it.

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.