[rspec-users] pontential bug in rspec_on_rails and ActiveRecord transactions

[Esad Hajdarevic]

Hello rspec-users,

I've encountered a strange bug in rspec, but it may be me who is wrong.

I'm running latest version from the trunk (r1678) of both rspec and 
rspec_on_rails.

Please consider the following model:

class Url < ActiveRecord::Base
   def after_save
     Contact.create!(:primary_email => 'user at example.com')
     raise ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid.new(self)
   end
end

Basically what it does is that in after_save it will insert a new 
contact into database but after the exception has been raised, the Rails 
will make a rollback on transaction.

Running in console:

Url.create!(:url => 'http://example.com')

Will yield following SQL (taken from the log)

  BEGIN
  INSERT INTO urls (`icon_url`, `domain`, `url`, `cached_version`, 
`description`, `created_at`) VALUES(NULL, NULL, 
'http://www.example.com/', 0, NULL, '2007-04-04 15:36:08')
  INSERT INTO contacts (`internal_id`, `name`, `updated_at`, 
`primary_email`, `notes`, `user_id`, `created_at`) VALUES(NULL, NULL, 
'2007-04-04 15:36:08', 'user at example.com', NULL, NULL, '2007-04-04 
15:36:08')
  ROLLBACK

However, when I wrote the specification that looked something like this:

context "Url" do
   setup do
     Contact.delete_all
     Url.delete_all
   end

   specify do
     lambda { Url.create(:url => 'http://www.example.com/') }.should 
raise_error
     Url.count.should == 0
     Contact.count.should == 0
   end
end

It failed!

The log output was:

  BEGIN
  DELETE FROM contacts
  DELETE FROM urls
  INSERT INTO urls (`icon_url`, `domain`, `url`, `cached_version`, 
`description`, `created_at`) VALUES(NULL, NULL, 
'http://www.example.com/', 0, NULL, '2007-04-04 15:35:46')
  INSERT INTO contacts (`internal_id`, `name`, `updated_at`, 
`primary_email`, `notes`, `user_id`, `created_at`) VALUES(NULL, NULL, 
'2007-04-04 15:35:46', 'user at example.com', NULL, NULL, '2007-04-04 
15:35:46')
  SELECT count(*) AS count_all FROM urls
  ROLLBACK

How did count statement got into transaction? Is rspec doing some magic 
with ActiveRecord that is causing this to happen?

Thanks for your help,

Esad