I’m using Cucumber for testing my Rails project. The standard practice for automated testing in Rails is to make each test case completely self-contained and wipe out the test data after running the test. The test system accomplishes this by wrapping the operations in a transaction and rolling that transaction back at the end of the test. This is great, except when you’re developing code and you want to poke around the test environment to see what’s going on outside the handful of error messages you might get from a failed test.

I set up my test environment so that data stays in place after a test is run, and I modified my tests to delete data they need deleted. This is what I set in my features/support/env.rb:

Cucumber::Rails::World.use_transactional_fixtures = false

I also removed database_cleaner.

You can set this behaviour on a case-by-case basis with the tag @no-txn.

Running the tests individually with bundle exec cucumber ... now works. I still have to figure out why the database gets dropped when I do rake cucumber, though…

2011-04-24 Sun 16:21