Rails - Nov 2011 - Rails 2.x testing (needs authentication and coordination with other server)...

Hello, all!

I''ve been a subscriber for a bit, but now I have a question for those
more
knowledgeable than I.

Background:
    I''ve inherited a Rails 2.3.x app, and have had some issues
installing
the right versions of rspec / rubygems / etc. to find compatible versions,
but I pretty much have discovered that I may need a modified approach to
testing other than the straightforward tutorials.  The app came with no
working tests (although there are stubs for fixtures-based tests inheriting
from ActionController::TestCase).  I''ve been playing with Rails
part-time
but this is my first "big" project.  We''ll be doing
significant mods soon,
but I don''t want to do too much until we have a good testing strategy. 
I
replaced a manual deploy with capistrano, etc. so we''re pretty ok for
small
mods but wholesale changes scare me without any tests.

  The application doesn''t manage its own login -- the accounts /
passwords
are stored on an external system.  There is a fairly intimate coordination
of data between the external system and the rails app:  authentication
takes place remotely, but app permissions are stored on the rails side.
 The app will modify data both on the Rails side and the external side, but
some initial setup on the external site is needed before anything can
happen on Rails, and periodic tasks have to be performed on the external
server (manually) in order to simulate a true workflow.  So, we can''t
really authenticate in a test, or do anything meaningful, without setup on
both the external system and the rails system.  This leads me to believe
that using the ''test'' database, which is regenerated / rolled
back often,
is a problem.   I also can''t believe that I''m the only one who
faces issues
like this in designing tests for a Rails application.

  Additional complications include the following:
     - Data must be uploaded to the rails side, processed, and then sent
over manually to the external server, and processed there with multiple
human interactions.  Only after that happens can some of the tests be
performed on the rails side, and the tests change both rails data and
external data.  If a test were to be performed after all that setup, and
the rails side of the database was to be "rolled back", there would be
inconsistencies between the rails db and the external db which might
confound any future test results without cleaning everything up and
starting over again, something which would take between 10 and 50 minutes
to create (depending upon how much of a "clean slate" we want on both
sides).

   - We have dependencies upon the web server (webrick doesn''t work,
and
only older versions of passenger work).  This is due to some nasty encoding
we do to send encoded ''/'' characters via URL params, and we
end up with
double encodings with certain servers.  If any of the test mechanisms also
have this issue with sending / retrieving / and generating links with the
''/'' encoded URL parameters, we''d again have
confounding results.  I''d like
to break this dependency, but again, it would be nice to have some tests
first!

I''ve thought of possibly using an existing set of test data on the
remote
side (with matched data on the Rails side), and running the tests with the
data on the rails side until we''ve "used up" that data set
(after certain
sets of operations on the rails side, the particular data item is no longer
modifiable in the same manner), but that doesn''t appear to be obvious
how
I''d do that with either unit tests / fixtures or rspec.  Additionally,
uploading a file in a particular format is an integral step in many of the
rails-side tests -- integrating that into the testing framework would be
nice, but there''s probably a lot that could be done before we had to do
that.

It almost seems that we need to have a GUI-based driver for the more
complicated things (such as uploading files / checking results).  On the
other hand, the basic get requests do require a lot of setup (as I''ve
described above) that doesn''t seem obvious to me with the current test
options.

Any suggestions for test infrastructure gems, tutorials, blog posts, etc.
that might be of use would be appreciated.  Right now, I''d rather get
the
tests working rather than try to bring this app up to 3.x in order to pull
in the fanciest new tools ;-)

If anyone has some ideas and needs more info, I''ll try to provide that
as
well, it seems like this post is long enough already!

Thanks and best wishes,

- Rholmes

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