Tatva-Artha

I documented about a gotcha with cookie testing in rails recently. Today I found another one.

After the test call, you can assert cookie value as:

should "set some cookie properly" do
  # 1. setup test data
  ...
  # 2. perform test
  ...
  # 3. assert search result
  assert_not_nil cookies['auth_token']
end

However, when setting up test data, you can NOT use “cookies” call.

should "do something based on an existing cookie" do
  # 1. setup test data (the following line will not fail at runtime but it won't work as expected - it won't set the cookie)
  cookies['remember_me_token'] = "fqpoei13w0123"
  # 2. perform test
  ...
  # 3. assert search result
  assert_successful_autologin # assertion will fail
end

You have to use either controller.request.cookies or @request.cookies:

should "do something based on an existing cookie" do
  # 1. setup test data (use controller.request.cookies or @request.cookies)
  controller.request.cookies['remember_me_token'] = "fqpoei13w0123"
  # 2. perform test
  ...
  # 3. assert search result
  assert_successful_autologin # this will work
end

I dug a little into rails code to see what could be the reason and if it could be improved and I found this:

class ActionController::TestCase
  include TestProcess
end
 
module TestProcess
    def session
      @request.session
    end
 
    def flash
      @response.flash
    end
 
    def cookies
      @response.cookies
    end
end

As we can see the cookies method is returning the response cookies and not request cookies. Also, session call returns @request.session which is the same for both request/response.

For cookies, they had to pick one and they chose Response. For simplicity, I would not use cookies call, and just use controller.request.cookies and controller.response.cookies. The tests are more understandable/maintainable that way.

Now I know!

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