What´s the best way to have "constant" db re cords and have them available in tests?

Rails
1

Hello,
I have a model called Contents, and every content belongs to a Role.
The Roles are suposed to be constants (they are always the same and
don’t change), so I decided to create a migrate to insert the data in
the db. The point was that every role has more properties, like
priority, and I found it was not a good idea to create a simple class
with normal constants. Furthermore, I added a method (const_missing)
in the model Role so when I search a constant it checks the db table
and creates it dinamically.

My problem appeared when I was writing the tests because the migrates
don’t get executed, and so I don’t have any role in my test db. And
they are suposed to be constants and be always there.

In another project we used fixtures to fix this problem but I don’t
think that it’s the best way because you must keep synch the db and
the fixtures. Quite ugly.

Thanks in advance for your answers.

2

why would you have to keep your db and your fixtures synched? i would
not recommend that at all. but still, fixtures are the way to go
(imho).

3

The problem is not about how I synch the db’s, cause I don’t think
it’s a good solution.
The thing is that I have some constants ins my application, like you
know, TRUE=1 and FALSE=0, and you obviously wanna have them in your
tests. The difference is that my constants are my Roles. I decided to
put them in the DB because they are not a single value, but something
like a constant object. Maybe it’s not the best decision, that’s why
I’m asking. Anyway, I’ve seen other serious plugins using db tables to
store constants.

I’ve been thinking about it and maybe it is a good solution to avoid
the migrates to insert that kind of data, but use instead an
initializer. It will insert the data the first time in every
enviroment. The only think is that it will be probably better to
create the table from the initializer (cause it won’t insert the data
if you haven’t executed its migrate) and it might be not very neat.

4

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 5:12 AM, MaD [email protected] wrote:

why would you have to keep your db and your fixtures synched? i would
not recommend that at all. but still, fixtures are the way to go
(imho).

Hi, you should be able to create a rake task to sync the databases. If
you
perform a google search:

rails test database

Good luck,

-Conrad