Elliotte Rusty Harold has an entertaining story of REST and WS-* in the real world. One that involves air-conditioners. It wouldn’t take a genius to see that he’s in favour of RESTful interfaces as opposed to using Web Services. Personally, I haven’t had much experience with the implementation of external services using either, so it was a humorous read at least.
Zed Shaw shares his insights and experiences in building Mongrel.
I wanted to be able to have my testing regime automatically create files associated with model fixtures defined in the fixture files. Coincidentally, I'm using Sebastien Kanthak's file_column plugin for managing files in models.
After looking at the Fixture class and the FileColumn module, I realised that I needed a way to store the model attribute(s) that were passed in the call to file_column. What FileColumn did was create the methods according to the attribute passed into the method but the attribute itself is not actually stored anywhere.
Time to extend FileColumn:
As the name implies, the methods in ClassMethods are class methods on the including class. So in order to store the file_column attributes, we need a class variable, @@file_column_attributes. This variable is a hash with the model class name as the key and an array containing the attributes.I'll also implement a class method so that I'll be able to do Model.file_attributes and know what attributes have been file_columnised.
Next, we'll need to change the way fixtures are populated to the test database. This involves extending the Fixtures class.
We'll do this in test_helper.rb
The extended insert_fixtures method first invokes original_insert_fixtures, then checks whether the model has any file_column attributes. If it does, the files defined in the fixtures will be created if they don't already exist.
EDIT: Running functional tests with rake test:functionals fails miserably even though running the tests individually is just fine.