Setting more than one cookie in integration test causes NoMethodError after upgrading rails 2.3 - ruby-on-rails

Question

This all worked fine in rails 2.3.5, but when a contractor firm upgraded directly to 2.3.14 suddenly all the integration tests were saying:
NoMethodError: You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
You might have expected an instance of ActiveRecord::Base.
The error occurred while evaluating nil.[]
I have a before_filter on my ApplicationController that sets a bunch of cookies for some javascript to use, and I found that if I comment out all but one of the lines that sets cookie values, it works fine, and it doesn't matter which line I leave in.
before_filter :set_cookies
def set_cookies
cookies['logged_in'] = (logged_in ? 'y' : 'n')
cookies['gets_premium'] = (gets_premium ? 'y' : 'n')
cookies['is_admin'] = (is_admin ? 'y' : 'n')
end
If only one of these lines is active, everything is fine in the integration test, otherwise I get the error above. For example, consider the following test / response:
test "foo" do
get '/'
end
$ ruby -I"lib:test" test/integration/foo_test.rb -n test_foo -v
Loaded suite test/integration/foo_test
Started
test_foo(FooTest): E
Finished in 5.112648 seconds.
1) Error:
test_foo(FooTest):
NoMethodError: You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
You might have expected an instance of ActiveRecord::Base.
The error occurred while evaluating nil.[]
test/integration/foo_test.rb:269:in `test_foo'
1 tests, 0 assertions, 0 failures, 1 errors
But if any two of those cookie setting lines are commented out, I get:
$ ruby -I"lib:test" test/integration/foo_test.rb -n test_foo -v
Loaded suite test/integration/foo_test
Started
test_foo(FooTest): .
Finished in 1.780388 seconds.
1 tests, 0 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors
The website running in development and production mode works fine - this is just a matter of getting the tests passing. Also, with debugging output I have verified that the error does not get thrown in the method where the cookies get set, that all executes fine, it's somewhere later that the error happens (but the backtrace doesn't tell me where)

Answer 1

This turned out to be a bug in how rack rack writes cookies to the client along with the session cookie. Rack was including double newlines and omitting semi-colons.
Browsers like firefox can handle mildly malformed cookie data, but the integration test client couldn't.
To fix this I had to rewrite the cookie header before sending it to the client.
In environment.rb:
require 'rack_rails_cookie_header_hack'
And in lib/rack_rails_cookie_header_hack.rb:
class RackRailsCookieHeaderHack
def initialize(app)
#app = app
end
def call(env)
status, headers, body = #app.call(env)
if headers['Set-Cookie']
cookies = headers['Set-Cookie']
cookies = cookies.split("\n") if is_str = cookies.is_a?(String)
if cookies.respond_to?(:collect!)
cookies.collect! { |h| h.strip }
cookies.delete_if { |h| h.empty? }
cookies.collect! { |h| h.include?(';') ? h : h + ';' }
end
headers['Set-Cookie'] = is_str ? cookies.join("\n").strip : cookies
end
[status, headers, body]
end
end
Sorry the sources aren't articulated, I actually fixed this awhile ago and came across this questions and figured I'd post my patch.

Answer 2

L0ne's answer works for me, but you also need to include this - it can go at the bottom of lib/rack_rails_cookie_header_hack.rb, providing you're requiring it at the bottom of your environment.rb file - ie after the Rails::Initializer has run:
ActionController::Dispatcher.middleware.insert_before(ActionController::Base.session_store, RackRailsCookieHeaderHack)

Answer 3

Old forgotten issues...
I haven't tested Lone's fix but he has correctly identified the problem. If you catch the exception and print using exception.backtrace, you'll see that the problem is caused by
gems/actionpack/lib/action_controller/integration.rb:329
The offending code is this:
cookies.each do |cookie|
name, value = cookie.match(/^([^=]*)=([^;]*);/)[1,2]
#cookies[name] = value
end
If you're like me, and you're only interested in some super quick integration tests, and don't care too much about future maintainability (since it's rails 2), then you can just add a conditional filter in that method
cookies.each do |cookie|
unless cookie.blank?
name, value = cookie.match(/^([^=]*)=([^;]*);/)[1,2]
#cookies[name] = value
end
end
and problem solved