Cache Test Dummy

I use page caching in a lot of my projects, but could never figure out how to test them properly. There's a pretty good plugin that does this but I could never get it to work right. Until today, when I noticed that caching is turned off in testing mode! No wonder I couldn't test it!

So, it seems obvious now, but it never occurred to me to change this line in my test.rb file:

config.action_controller.perform_caching = true

Note that you will have to make sure your pages get swept properly after running your tests. I have a rake task that deletes all of the files, I think I got it from the Peepcode caching episode:

desc "Delete all cached files"
task :sweep_cache => "tmp:cache:clear" do

  %w(index.html shows* about.html audio.html contact.html photos.html photos/*.html).each do |pattern|
 
   rm_rf(Dir[File.join(RAILS_ROOT, "public", pattern)])

  end
  
end

A little clunky, but it works. I might someday come up with a way to invoke all of my sweepers instead so I don't have to manually add all of those filenames. I think call this task from an autotest hook:

 [:red, :green].each do |hook|
    Autotest.add_hook hook do |at|
      `rake sweep_cache` if File.exist?("#{FileUtils.pwd}/lib/tasks/cache.rake")
    end
  end

Because the plugin doesn't have many examples, here's a couple of my tests:
caching_story_test.rb

class CachingStoryTest < ActionController::IntegrationTest
  fixtures :all

  def test_page_caching
    assert_cache_pages(about_path, contact_path)
  end

  def test_storyteller_caching
    storyteller = storytellers(:storyteller_show_1_id_1)
    assert_cache_pages(show_storyteller_path(:id => storyteller.id, :show_id => storyteller.show.id))
  end

end

sweeping_story_test.rb

class SweepingStoryTest < ActionController::IntegrationTest
  
  fixtures :all
  include LoginLogoutDSL
  include StoopDefaults
  
  def test_should_sweep_news_items
    
    logs_in
    news_item = news_items(:double_whammy)
    
    assert_expire_pages(news_items_path, news_item_path(news_item), index_path) do |*urls|
      put news_item_path(:id => news_item.id), :news_item => @@news_item_default_values
    end      

    assert_expire_pages(news_items_path, index_path) do |*urls|
      post news_items_path, :news_item => @@news_item_default_values
    end      

    assert_expire_pages(news_items_path, news_item_path(news_item), index_path) do |*urls|
      delete news_item_path(:id => news_item.id)
    end      
    
  end
end

(I'm sure there's a way to DRY up that last test, but I found it much harder to figure out which test was failing when I did that.

Last note: the expiration test only work with path routes, not url routes. So you call "delete news_item_path(...)" vs "delete news_item_url(...)".