Factory Girl / Capybara deleting records from database mid-test?

Question

Working with RSpec & Capybara, I\'m getting an interesting test failure mode which goes away with a few subtle rearrangements of lines in the test case...stuff that shouldn\

Answer 1

This isn't technically an answer, more of a comment but to clarify the code it's the easiest mechanism.

Can you try doing the following to help narrow down where the user's being destroyed

describe "Sessions" do
  it 'allows user to login' do
    #line one
    user = Factory(:user)
    #For SO, this method hashes the input password and saves the record
    user.password! '2468'


# check the user's definitely there before page load
puts User.first

    #line two
    visit '/sessions/index'

# check the user's still there after page load
puts User.first.reload


    fill_in 'Email', :with => user.email
    fill_in 'Password', :with => '2468'
    click_button 'Sign in'

# check the user's still there on submission (though evidently not)
puts User.first.reload

    page.should have_content('Logged in')
  end
end

EDIT

The fact that it works for you ok in real life but not in Capybara suggests that it may be a product of existing session information. When you're testing in the browser you're usually going off the back of previous work but Capybara is always starting from a clean session.

You can easily see if you can reproduce the Capybara error in-browser by clearing all your cookies (as I'm sure you know) or by just switching to a new incognito window in Chrome/FF which is a nice quick way to get a clean session.