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I'm new to the concept of test-driven development (and fairly new to Rails). I'm stuck with how to approach writing a test for my application.

As a backgrounder, the web app is a peer evaluation tool where individual groups are assigned surveys where they are asked to evaluate their peers. So a sample question would look like this:

Rate your peers on time management. - Peer 1: __ - Peer 2: __ - Yourself: __

How I have this set up internally is as so:

I have a Survey model with a has_many association to an Assignment model (which controls the visibility of surveys among groups), which acts as a join model for Survey and a Group model. In the Group model there is a has_many association with Users.

Because multiple groups can be assigned the same survey, I have to find out which Group a certain user is asked to evaluate. (So the survey would be the same, but the people that show up as in the sample above would change from user to user).

I have decided to create a method, assignees_for_user(user), which would return, essentially, the user's group(s) that have been assigned to the survey.

I want to be able to unit test this method. I am using rspec and factory_girl so far. I have a few questions:

  1. Is my approach even correct design-wise?
  2. Should I test this? If so, I'll need to create instances for Assignment, Group, and User, right?
  3. What's the best way I can stub/mock these instances without persisting them onto the database? Or will I have to?

Thanks!

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This answer was more complicated than I expected (and to be honest, I guess that's why no one answered it :P)

You can use frameworks like mocha to mock things like find: How to test ActiveRecord witout Rails?

I ended up using rr instead. But when it comes to activerecord associations, I still haven't found a good way to do it because I don't fully understand the ActiveRecord association proxy objects. So I guess my takeaway in all of this is, honestly, not to waste my time mocking associations in the first place: As an old adage goes, you can't unit test something that isn't your own!

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Can I suggest that refactoring the business logic from both the activerecord model (think of it as a database adaptor) and controller (think of it as a GUI adaptor) to plain old ruby objects (PORO) in the lib/ is the way to go.

Hexagonal Rails by Matt Wynne, Rails Conf 2013 Building Extractable Libraries in Rails by Patrick Robertson, Making ActiveRecord Models Thin and Gary Bernhardt are good places to start.

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