Testing file uploads to attachment_fu using RSpec ☆

I’ve been doing quite a lot of Behaviour Driven Development using RSpec recently. However, I hit a problem topday, I was trying to test file uploads to Rick Olson’s attachment_fu plugin. First I thought all I had to do was to pass it a file handle or contents of a file, not so. The tests failed moaning of missing methods. I had a rummage around in the tests for the plugin itself.

A upload_file function is called in the attachment tests and defined in test/test_helper.rb. This in turn calls the Rails fixture_file_upload function. This creates a fake file upload which can then be used to create a new attachment.

The only thing is that all the files are uploaded to the public directory which leave it rather messy. In the code I’m using below told both the path_prefix for my attachment to be the tmp/test_images directory and deleted that after each test incarnation. The only problem with this is that it takes ages for the tests to run. :-(

TEST_DIR = "tmp/test_images" 

before(:each) do
  Image.attachment_options[:path_prefix] = 
     "#{TEST_DIR}/images" 
  @image = Image.create :uploaded_data =>
     fixture_file_upload("test_image.jpg", "image/jpg")
end

after(:each) do
  @image.destroy
  FileUtils.rm_rf File.join(RAILS_ROOT, TEST_DIR)
end