Finding records with booleans

[Michael MacDonald]

Hi all,

In a cucumber scenario I am using pickle like so:

    Then the following users should exist:

      | name | expired  |

      | Owen | false  |

      | Aiden | true  |

using the built pickle step definition for finding models using a cucumber table.

Normally, this works well except when I’m trying to find records with a boolean attribute. Instead of finding expired: true, the cucumber table returns everything as a string so that pickle receives it as expired: “true”. There’s no problem with creating records using tables because ActiveRecord performs the typecasting when a new record is created. This is not the case when you find a record. For example:

    u = User.new(:expired => “true”)

    u.expired #=> true

    User.find(:all, :conditions => { :expired => “true”}) #=> empty array (none found)

This is also a problem when using floats.

I considered possibly using cucumber transforms (but don’t want potentially want all trues and falses converted to booleans since I often deal with legacy data where columns are strings of true and false) and I considered modifying the pickle step definition to modify the boolean strings to actual booleans but I was hoping for a better solution.

I looked at modifying pickle to automatically convert these strings to their appropriate values according to the attribute’s type and this is what I got:

    def convert_models_to_attributes(ar_class, attrs)

      conditions = {}

      attrs.each do |key, val|

        if ((defined?(ActiveRecord::Base) && val.is_a?(ActiveRecord::Base)) ||

          (defined?(DataMapper::Model) && val.is_a?(DataMapper::Model))) &&

          Pickle::Adapter.column_names(ar_class).include?("#{key}_id")

          conditions["#{key}_id"] = val.id

          conditions["#{key}_type"] = val.class.base_class.name if ar_class.column_names.include?("#{key}_type")

        elsif defined?(ActiveRecord::Base) &&

          Pickle::Adapter.column_hash(ar_class)[key.to_s].type == :boolean

          conditions[key] = ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::Column::TRUE_VALUES.include?(val) ? true : false

        else

          conditions[key] = val

        end

      end

      conditions

    end

Available at: https://github.com/schlick/pickle/commits/booleans

I’m not sure whether this is the right approach and has hoping for some feedback and advice.

Thanks,

Michael.