Rails, Rspec, and testing controllers with the same name

It’s important to write tests for your code.

However, I was trying to write some tests for a pair of rails controllers with the same name, but different modules. The controllers look something like this:

# app/controllers/my_controller.rb
class MyController < ApplicationController
...
end

# app/controllers/subsection/my_controller.rb
class Subsection::MyController < Subsection::ApplicationController
...
end

Then I wrote Rspec tests for each, which all work when run one file at a time:

# spec/controllers/my_controller_spec.rb
require 'spec_helper'
describe MyController do
...
end

# spec/controllers/subsection/my_controller_spec.rb
require 'spec_helper'
describe Subsection::MyController do
...
end

However, when I ran all the tests at once using ‘$ rake spec’, the tests for Subsection::MyController always tried to use the MyController at the base level for the controller, which led to an error like this:

ActionController::UrlGenerationError:
       No route matches {:action=>"the_action", :controller=>"my_controller", :id=>"123"}

I finally found the solution after chasing the wrong symptoms. I can’t explain it better than this guy. In short, require the class you’re testing at the top of your test files to ensure the right class is being loaded:

# spec/controllers/my_controller_spec.rb
require 'my_controller'
require 'spec_helper'

describe MyController do
...
end

# spec/controllers/subsection/my_controller_spec.rb
require 'subsection/my_controller'
require 'spec_helper'
describe Subsection::MyController do
...
end