capybara-webkit - rails session not retained/set - ruby-on-rails

Question

Ive setup capybara-webkit for my integration tests and Im running into a very simple problem. My session is not being stored. The use case is pretty simple
1. Login
2. Go to a specific page
3. Check if it has the approp content
Now at step 2 my app is returning the test case to the login page - which means the session is not being set properly.
any help is much appreciated
If I use #culerity instead of #javascript then this test case passes so the problem seems to be the capybara-webkit setup
My env.rb for capybara-webkit support is as follows
Spork.prefork do
require 'cucumber/rails'
require 'capybara'
require 'capybara/dsl'
require 'capybara/cucumber'
require 'capybara-webkit'
Capybara.run_server = false
Capybara.javascript_driver = :webkit
Capybara.default_selector = :css
# Capybara defaults to XPath selectors rather than Webrat's default of CSS3. In
# order to ease the transition to Capybara we set the default here. If you'd
# prefer to use XPath just remove this line and adjust any selectors in your
# steps to use the XPath syntax.
# Capybara.default_host = "127.0.0.1:3000"
Capybara.app_host = "http://localhost:3000"
end
Update 1:
Looks like the sessions is being set. I used the following code to dump the session in my steps
puts(Capybara.current_session.driver.browser.get_cookies)
and I got the follwoing - so looks like cookie is being set but not being sent back
["_jqt_session=BAh7CEkiD3Nlc3Npb25faWQGOgZFRiIlYmMwYzNjYjY0MGU3NTg0OWFlNTcwODhmM2I2MzE1YmRJIhBfY3NyZl90b2tlbgY7AEZJIjEwRzN6NG1NTzZqamNCNC9FdWZWeXBCMHdoeThueXBnaTJDcTVzbmJqQlBZPQY7AEZJIgpmbGFzaAY7AEZJQzolQWN0aW9uRGlzcGF0Y2g6OkZsYXNoOjpGbGFzaEhhc2h7BjoKYWxlcnRJIh9JbnZhbGlkIGVtYWlsIG9yIHBhc3N3b3JkLgY7AFQGOgpAdXNlZG86CFNldAY6CkBoYXNoewY7B1Q%3D--3fbe1c2a77a433228e7b7f2d8c8f0aec3ad5fb5f; HttpOnly; domain=localhost; path=/"]
Update 2:
was barking up the wrong tree. Seems that the user I was creating in my test case was not being seen by the rails app as my database cleaner strategy was set to transactional. see more info at
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/ruby-capybara/JI6JrirL9gM/R6YiXj4gi_UJ

Answer 1

To add more clarity,
Capybara webkit or selenium driver is running in a different thread then app, so if you are using transactional fixtures or database_cleaner with strategy :transaction and your data isn't commited to db and another thread won't see it.
Possible solutions are:
Use database_cleaner with strategy :truncation. (solid, but a slow)
Add code to force active record using single transaction for all threads. (faster, but may have some issues, ex.: after_commit hooks aren't called, as there's no commit)
#Capybara use the same connection
class ActiveRecord::Base
mattr_accessor :shared_connection
##shared_connection = nil
def self.connection
##shared_connection || retrieve_connection
end
end
# Forces all threads to share the same connection. This works on
# Capybara because it starts the web server in a thread.
ActiveRecord::Base.shared_connection = ActiveRecord::Base.connection
I'm using 2-nd option, but it's arguable.