Rails - Functional test failing because of validation

Question

I can't for the life of me figure out what's going wrong here. This is the situation:

• I have a document model using paperclip for pdf attachments
• The functional test uploads a document and fails
• The reason for this is my validation that it is a pdf file - somehow that validation fails
• However, the file is a pdf and the validation should not fail
• The validation only fails in the test - doing it manually by uploading the file it complains about works absolutely fine

Here is my failing test (the count is not increased by one):

test "should create document" do
  assert_difference('Document.count') do
    post :create, document: { pdf: fixture_file_upload("../files/document_test_file.pdf"), language: @document.language, published_on: @document.published_on, tags: @document.tags, title: @document.title, user_id: @user }
  end

  assert_redirected_to document_path(assigns(:document))
end

This is my validation in the document model:

def document_is_a_pdf
  if !self.pdf.content_type.match(/pdf/)
    errors.add(:pdf, "must be a pdf file")
    false
  end
end

If I do not call that validation in the model, the test runs fine. What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

I know this is an old question but if anyone still needs help,

From http://apidock.com/rails/ActionController/TestProcess/fixture_file_upload

  fixture_file_upload(path, mime_type = nil, binary = false)

Fixture file upload method by default will set the mime type as nil so simply changing the mime type as below will correct this

 fixture_file_upload("../files/document_test_file.pdf", 'application/pdf')

Answer 2

I found the problem. Somehow, while testing, the content type could not be determined. That is why the validation of the content type failed and the test did not pass.

I added the content type to the accessible attributes inside my document model and inserted the content type in the test (second attribute inside the document hash):

test "should create document" do
  assert_difference('Document.count') do
    post :create, document: { pdf: fixture_file_upload("../files/document_test_file.pdf"), pdf_content_type: "application/pdf", language: @document.language, published_on: @document.published_on, tags: @document.tags, title: @document.title, user_id: @user }
  end

  assert_redirected_to document_path(assigns(:document))
end