Rails::logger.info “\n\nStarting #{name}\n#{‘-’ * (9 + @name.length)}\n”

http://www.inwebwetrust.net/post/2008/08/19/redefine-the-run-method-of-test-unit-testcase

Anyway, this is what I did before finding Fernando’s approach:

For Unit Tests, add the setup method below in each test .rb file (you can also add a teardown method to log the end of the test, but having the start logged between each test was a good enough of delimiter for me). If you already have a setup method, of course just add the logger code line.

def setup
RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER.info “\n\nStarting #{@method_name}\n#{‘-’ * (9 + @method_name.length)}\n”
end

For Functional tests (because mine still use Test::Unit::TestCase), simply add the logger code line to the existing setup method.

Sorry for the previous posts and confusion. There is a better approach to keep this DRY, but until I figure that out, this is what I’ve done, it worked, so I thought I’d share — but I encourage you to learn the proper approach.

b

b

def setup
RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER.info “\n\nStarting #{@method_name}\n#{‘-’ * (9 + @method_name.length)}\n”
end

Or perhaps things have changed in a newer version of Rails. (Or an older one.)

The code above works in Rails 2.0.2. There’s a file called setup_and_teardown.rb that has these lines:

base.send :include, ActiveSupport::Callbacks
base.define_callbacks :setup, :teardown

define_callbacks creates a “setup” method and a “teardown” method as class methods. These methods are very much like the before_save, after_save, etc. methods, in that they take a parameter which is the name of a function to call before setup and after teardown. So my code that says “setup :log_test” tells the test framework to call the :log_test function before calling the “setup” instance method.

Perhaps things work differently in other versions of Rails.

I dropped the code into my Rails 2.0.2 app’s test_helper.rb and got this error trying to run a unit test:

./test/unit/../test_helper.rb:42: undefined method `setup’ for Test::Unit::TestCase:Class (NoMethodError)

Anyone else seeing this?

http://www.benmabey.com/2008/07/04/global-setup-in-rspec-or-how-to-add-logging-for-specs/

Happy July 4th!