Chapter 6 controller test problems

[donholloway]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to work through Patrick Lenz' book. And am getting stuck on the functional tests. I am running Instant Rails 2.0. I have run into one difference from the book, which was to do with scaffolding, but since the book was only using it for a quick demonstration, then building views directly, I didn't worry about it.

I built the view and controller the way the book said, ran the unit tests, which all worked perfectly. The differences between my skeleton functional test file and the books were pretty significant. I first tried making the book edits based on the generated skeleton (assuming the 2.0 changes were important) I tried running the rake test: functionals and got a bunch of errors, so I went back and used the book story_controller_test.rb. I've checked everything as much as I could.

When I run the functional tests, I get an error that says

1) Error: test_should_show_index(StoryControllerTest):
ActionView::TemplateError: You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
The error occured while evaluating nil.name 
    On line #2 of story/index.html.erb

It shows the only two lines of code in my index.html.erb file which are as follows:

A random link:
<%= link_to @story.name, @story.link %>

It then spits out 30-40 lines of ruby/libs/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/* all kinds of problems.

Any ideas? Are their any global changes that need to be done to accomodate the book to 2.0? I am new to Ruby (hence the book) and assume that any references to .rhtml are now to be changed to .html.erb.

Here is my story_controller_test.rb file

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../test_helper'
require 'story_controller'

# Re-raise errors caught by the controller
class StoryController; def rescue_action(e) raise e end; end

class StoryControllerTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
	fixtures :stories
	def setup
		@controller = StoryController.new
		@request = ActionController::TestRequest.new
		@response = ActionController::TestResponse.new
	end
	
  def test_should_show_index
    get :index
    assert_response :success
    assert_template 'index'
    assert_not_nil assigns(:story)
  end
end

Please let me know if there is more info that you need to give me any guidance. Happy Mother's Day everyone.

Don

[AllTom]

It's saying that your view code is trying to ask nil.name, which here means that @story is nil. That means that the controller is not assigning any value to @story.

[donholloway]

At least I know where to start looking. Thanks.

[Fenrir2]

Please post your controller code it you need further help. The problem is likely in your controller.

[donholloway]

Here is my controller code, I double checked and it is the same as in the book.

class StoryController < ApplicationController
  
  def index
    @story = Story.find(:first, :order => 'RAND()')
  end
  
  def new
    @story = Story.new(params[:story])
    if request.post? and @story.save
      flash[:notice] = 'Story submission succeeded'
      redirect_to :action => 'index'
    end
  end
  
end

[ParkinT]

Is there data in your database?
As AllTom stated, your @story variable is nil. That is being read from the database. Maybe the database is empty.