As part of my attempts to upgrade tinySIS to Rails 2, I am updating the test fixtures. I am starting with a basic set of fixtures to cover subject areas, contracts, users, enrollments, and settings. I’ll expand this fixture set later, but the goal right now is to get a test database up and limping so I can write a basic set of functional smoke-tests to verify the app before I deploy. Kind of sad, as the app has been in production for almost two school years now - and despite the lack of automated testing, it’s quite stable - but I am trying to move it in the 20th century.
I found a couple good resources on the new fixtures stuff:
Thanks, Ryans.
I won’t reiterate the great info in the above postings. I will just show you excerpts from my starter fixture set. I started by dumping my old test database to yml (the database was created using fixture_scenarios, which I did get to somewhat-work under Rails 2 but decided to go with the native Rails fixtures instead).
My mythological school is kind of inbred.
The Google Embeddable Calendar Helper rocks. You can create multiple Google calenders under your account and create one merged calender view showing all of them. We created a shared calendar for Church of the Resurrection, Hosanna Assemblea de Dios, and Holy Apostles church here:
http://resurrectionbellevue.org/happening/calendar
You can color code the various calenders. The view provides a drop-down selector where users can pick which calenders to display – and a “save as” feature off the print button that creates a PDF. Nice.
Dreamhost just rolled out Passenger / mod_rails — a simplified way to run Rails apps on Dreamhost shared servers. Here are my notes on setting up a nice Dreamhost environment for your Rails app. I use a separate user for each Rails app. My apps run pretty well. They are not fast to boot up, but once running, they are reasonably snappy - I don’t host any high traffic sites on my shared domains.
One lovely thing about mod_rails - when your app is screwed up and won’t boot, you get a helpful error screen with a Rails stack trace. Huge.
