Can't Get Model to Pass Rspec with ActiveRecord Relation

Question

Model: payment.rb

class Payment < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :loan

  def self.previous_payments(id)
    where(loan_id: id)
  end

end

All I am trying to do is test to make sure a payment is found if it has the correct loan_id

Test:

describe '#self.previous_payments' do
  let(:loan) {Loan.create!(id: 1, funded_amount: 1000.0)}
  let(:payment_one) {Payment.create!(amount: 100.0, loan_id: 1)}
  let(:payment_test) {Payment.previous_payments(1)}

  it 'retrieves all the payments made for a specific loan' do
    expect(payment_test.first.loan_id).to eql(1)
  end
end

But I keep getting this error:

expected: 1
got: #<ActiveRecord::Relation []>

And it looks like [] means that no records were even found?

Any help at all would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

Rspec's let syntax is lazy, meaning that loan and payment_one won't exist until they are explicitly called in your test. Because payment_test doesn't make any explicit calls to loan or payment_one , it returns an empty relation. If you use let! , your variables won't be lazily loaded:

let!(:loan) {Loan.create!(id: 1, funded_amount: 1000.0)}
let!(:payment_one) {Payment.create!(amount: 100.0, loan_id: 1)}

You could also do something like

loan.reload
payment_one.reload
expect(payment_test.first.loan_id).to eql(1)

within the test to force loan and payment_one to be loaded.