Ruby on Rails 2.3.8: Testing: How do I set up an instance variable to use throughout my tests?

Question

Lets say I have some data that remanis the same throughout all of my tests, for forever and eternity. I create this data in setup . I store the data to @instance_var . But when I call @instance_var.attribute in any test, I get the following error:

RuntimeError: Called id for nil, which would mistakenly be 4 -- if you really wanted the id of nil, use object_id

I know my instance variable isn't null, cause after it is set, I can do a puts @instance_var.inspect on it...

Any ideas?

EDIT:

 setup do
    user = Factory(:user)
    account = Factory(:account)    

    set_user(user)
    set_account(account)


    puts "||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||" #this proves that the instance vars are not null
    puts "| object_test.rb                            |"
    puts "|      #{@user.name}                   "
    puts "|      #{@account.name}                "
    puts "||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||"
  end

A failing test (with the error above)

test "for detection of first content with multiple contents" do
      object = Factory(:object, :user_id => @user.id, :account_id => @account.id)
   ... #the rest of this test isn't important, as it is the above line, on @user, where the nil.id error occers

in test_helper.rb

def set_user(user)
  @user = user
end

def set_account(account)
  @account = account
end

I don't really think I need these two methods, as when I define the @instance variable in setup, I get teh same result

in test_helper.rb there are some constants set fore ActiveSupport::TestCase:

  self.use_transactional_fixtures = true

  self.use_instantiated_fixtures  = false

  fixtures :all

disabling these did nothing. =(

Answer 1

Have you tried

setup do
  @user = Factory(:user)
  @account = Factory(:account)
end

Normally, if you set the instance variables in the setup block, they should be available to all your tests. (You might be having an issue with scopes.)

Answer 2

My solution was to make a shared class, shared_test.rb

require 'test_helper'

class SharedTest
  def self.initialize_testing_data
    self.reset_the_database

    self.set_up_user_and_account
    # make sure our user and account got created 
    puts "|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||"
    puts "| The user and account "
    puts "| we'll be testing with:"
    puts "|             #{@user.name}"
    puts "|             #{@user.account.name}"
    puts "|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||"
  end

  def self.reset_the_database
    #clear the database and reset it
    call_rake("db:test:prepare")
    call_rake("db:bootstrap RAILS_ENV=test")
  end

  def self.set_up_user_and_account
    #set up our user for doing all our tests (this person is very busy)  
    @user = Factory(:user)
    @account = Factory(:account)    
    @user.account = @account
    @user.save
  end
end

so then at the top of every test file that needs user and account to stay the same between all the tests, you just do

require 'shared_test.rb'

and methods are called like

SharedTest.initialize_testing_data