Machinist/Authlogic problem -- Validation failed: User is invalid (password "can't be blank")

[Mitch]

Hi, all

I've recently started using Machinist to clean up my company's
cucumber and rspec test code, which had massive duplication,
particularly between the two sides. This was going great until I hit
this snag with User...

We have Users, with a many-to-many relationship to Group through
Membership.
User is the user for AuthLogic, and the models look like this:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :memberships
has_many :groups, :through => :memberships
end
class Group < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :memberships
has_many :users, :through => :memberships
end
class Membership < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :group, :validate=>true
belongs_to :user, :validate=>true
end

With blueprints as obvious:

User.blueprint do
email
password { "asdf" }
password_confirmation { password }
end
Group.blueprint do
end
Membership.blueprint do
group
user
end

The problem arises in our membership_spec, specifically in the test to
prevent duplicate memberships:
describe Membership do
it "should not be able to create an instance with duplicated
group_id and user_id combination" do
membership = Membership.make
duplicate_membership = Membership.make(:group_id =>
membership.group.id, :user_id => membership.user.id)
lambda{duplicate_membership.save!}.should raise_error() {|error| p
error.backtrace}
end
This fails with "ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid: Validation failed: User
is invalid", and checking membership.user.valid indicates that errors
just contains {"password"=>["can't be blank"]}
This does not occur when we create the user explicitly:

describe Membership do
it "should not be able to create an instance with duplicated
group_id and uer_id combination" do
user = User.make
membership = Membership.make(:user => user)
duplicate_membership = Membership.make(:group_id =>
membership.group.id, :user_id => user.id)
lambda{duplicate_membership.save!}.should raise_error() {|error| p
error.backtrace}
end

Did I make some obvious mistake? Please say yes :-)
Thanks in advance,
--Mitch

[Pete Yandell]

Hi Mitch,

That all looks ok to me, although I don't know what AuthLogic does
with the password field. I'm guessing there's some magic around
password hashing, etc.

No easy answer, I'm afraid! You'll have to keep digging.

- Pete