ArgumentError in 'TracksController downloading a track by admin should not be a redirection'
wrong number of arguments (0 for 1)
/Users/ewollesen/src/mildred/app/models/track.rb:52:in `title'
/Users/ewollesen/src/mildred/app/models/track.rb:52:in `filename'
/Users/ewollesen/src/mildred/app/controllers/tracks_controller.rb:49:in `download'
./spec/controllers/tracks_controller_spec.rb:82:

It took me a good while to figure out what was going on. The error was strange because as far as I knew, title was a database attribute in the Album model, which was a descendant of ActiveRecord. There shouldn’t have been any arguments required. Indeed, firing up my debugger and running track.album.read_attribute(:title) returned the expected result of “Test Album 1″. I was very puzzled.

I realized that my title method was being overridden, but by what? I started feeding the title method random arguments in the hopes of learning something new. It wasn’t long before I got lucky:

(rdb:1) e track.album.title("x")
NoMethodError Exception: undefined method `content_tag' for #<Album:0x3d5bbfc>

That tipped me off as to what was overriding my title method. The content_for is part of a pattern I use to set a view’s title in the layout via a method called title in my ApplicationHelper. This made me think of how in Rspec 1.1.4, a Helper module is no longer included by default. I popped over to my application_helper_spec.rb and found something similar to this:

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../spec_helper'

include ApplicationHelper

describe "ApplicationHelper" do

This needed to be changed to:

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../spec_helper'

describe "ApplicationHelper" do

  include ApplicationHelper

Then all was well. Whew. Just to be sure I didn’t run into this sort of thing again, I went ahead and made sure that all of my other Helper specs followed this paradigm.

This is the second time I’ve run into an issue where RSpec had overridden some seemingly random method in some seemingly random object. I guess there’s a lot of magic in there that I don’t have my head wrapped around yet. I just wish it were easier to spot!