Moving to Rails 2.3.8

I have recently decided to move to Rails version 2.3.8. I have tried rails 2.3 a while ago, but it did not agree with JRuby. As JRuby 1.5 is now available, I thought I should give it another go. Though I had the same problem, I fixed it this time.


application_controller.rb
The first change is that app/application.rb must be renamed to app/application_controller.rb, which certainly makes it more consistent.


JRuby and Rake
I think this was the issue that stopped my moving to 2.3.2. Running any rake command that accesses the database (and, for example, the test tasks invoke database tasks, so will do this as well) generates this:

rake aborted!
Task not supported by 'jdbcpostgresql'

The problem seems to have been know about two years ago (see here; more recently here). When Rake has to interact with the database, it checks the hash generated from your database.yml file, and finds the adapter is called jdbcpostgresql. It then compares this against the adapters it knows, trying - and failing - to match postgresql. The solution is to edit the rakes file that handles database interactions (rails-2.3.8\lib\tasks/databases.rake) and change every occurance of "postgresql" or 'postgresql' (with quotes) to /postgresql/. Now it will sucessfully match the jdbc adapter. Obviously if you are using another database, you need to change it for that.


Is test_helper loaded twice?
I have a couple of constants defined in test/test_helper.rb, and this causes warning that they have already been defined. I can only assume this is because the file is getting loaded twice, but I could not see why that might be the case.

Also in test/test_helper.rb, you need to change:

class Test::Unit::TestCase

... to:

class ActiveSupport::TestCase

Otherwise, you will get "undefined method `use_transactional_fixtures=' "


Deprecation warnings

"Giving :session_key to SessionStore is deprecated, please use :key instead."

In config/environment.rb, change :secret_key to :key. It will look something like this:

config.action_controller.session = {
:key => '_AuthSampleLog_session',
:secret      => #some big hex number
}

"Using assert_redirected_to with partial hash arguments is deprecated"

Usually, your redirect will specify a controller and an action, but occasionally you specify something else as well, such as an id. Now in Rails assert_redirected_to checks each of the key-value pairs that you specify (this is confusing because the API says they are all optional; considered with redirect_to they are option; they just have to match up).

So this is fine, because the test specifies the controller and the action.
# In the controller
redirect_to :controller => :audits, :action => :edit
# In the controller test
assert_redirected_to :controller => :audits, :action => :edit

In this case, the test must also specify the id, because it is given in the redirect_to.
# In the controller
redirect_to :controller => :audits, :action => :edit, :id => @audit_section.audit_id
# In the controller test
assert_redirected_to :controller => :audits, :action => :edit, :id => as.audit_id


Integration testing
I found some odd things happened with logging out in my integration tests; eventually isolated this to a known bug:
https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/2200-session-support-broken


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