Rspec rails testing - join table not working - ruby-on-rails

Question

(I replicated an isolated example of my issue on github: https://github.com/diingo/jobs_emps. It contains just the problematic portion - no views, no controllers, just the models I describe below and the breaking test.)
My code is working on development and production but currently a portion is breaking only in the test environment leaving me unable to test it properly.
Here's what's happening:
I have two models, jobs and employees. Each job has employees that oversee and participate in it as a specific role (employee_type) - Manager or Exective. Employees can be promoted - a manager can be promoted to an executive. But their roles for previous jobs they participated in must remain the same.
A join between employees and jobs (JobsEmployee) keeps track of the employee's role through the employee_type attribute. The join will not update a user's position if it was previously set - this is done with a before_save, as seen here:
class JobsEmployee < ActiveRecord::Base
before_save :set_user_type
def set_user_type
self.user_type ||= self.user.type
end
end
This works fine in actual use on development and production. If a job is created, with a manager and exective, job.jobs_employees will show one manager and one executive. If a manager is promoted to executive and that job is then updated for whatever reason, job.jobs_employees will still show one manager and one executive.
However, during testing this changes. Upon updating a job, if an employee was promoted, job.jobs_employees shows two executives.
My test is shown below. You can see I abstracted controller create and update methods into models for convenience. You can reference them on the github link: https://github.com/diingo/jobs_emps/blob/master/app/models/job.rb
RSpec.describe JobsEmployee, :type => :model do
before do
#job_permitted_params = {
city: "Munich",
status: "in_progress"
}
#manager = Employee.create!(name: "Bob Bobber", type: 'Manager')
#executive = Employee.create!(name: "Alice Smith", type: 'Executive')
#job_raw_params = {
job: {
manager_id: #manager.id,
executive_id: #executive.id
}
}
end
it "creates and updates" do
job = Job.create_with_params(#job_permitted_params, #job_raw_params)
# This passes:
expect(job.jobs_employees.map &:employee_type).to include("Manager", "Executive")
#manager.type = 'Executive'
#manager.save!
Job.update_with_params(job, #job_permitted_params, #job_raw_params)
# This breaks in testing but works in production:
expect(job.jobs_employees.map &:employee_type).to include("Manager", "Executive")
end
end
I put break points (pry debugger) in JobsEmployee#set_user_type to see what might be happening. It appears like the record in JobsEmployee are deleted before or during a Job update. So instead of seeing that self.user_type is already set in self.user_type ||= self.user.type, it just runs self.user.type again.
Here is the schema. You can also see it in the github link.
ActiveRecord::Schema.define(version: 20150301232938) do
create_table "employees", force: true do |t|
t.string "name"
t.string "type"
t.datetime "created_at"
t.datetime "updated_at"
end
create_table "jobs", force: true do |t|
t.string "city"
t.string "status"
t.datetime "created_at"
t.datetime "updated_at"
end
create_table "jobs_employees", force: true do |t|
t.string "employee_type"
t.integer "employee_id"
t.integer "job_id"
t.datetime "created_at"
t.datetime "updated_at"
end
end
I'm not sure why this is happening. Thanks so much for checking out the problem.

Answer 1

The "actual use" you are describing may not correlate with your test. Updating a job and changing an employee's role would not necessarily cause the wholesale reassignment of jobs_employees association that you are doing in your test. I suspect that when you are doing that, Rails is comparing the set of JobsEmployee records represented by the ids you are assigning to the currently associated records. Since the currently associated records have the user_type field set, they aren't equivalent to the records that would be created upon a fresh assignment, so they are deleted and new ones regenerated.