Why not use shared ActiveRecord connections for Rspec + Selenium?

Question

It seems the most commonly accepted way to deal with Selenium and tests is to avoid using transactional fixtures and then using something like database_cleaner between tests

Answer 1

I have encountered a problem using the code you mentioned in my spec_helper.rb file.

What happens when your tests depend on using connections to multiple databases? I have two databases I need to connect to when I run my tests. I did a simple test to check what was happening to the database connections I establish.

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.
puts "First Record cxn: #{FirstDatabase::Record.connection}"
# => First Record cxn: #
puts "AR Base cxn: #{ActiveRecord::Base.connection}"
# => AR Base cxn: #
ActiveRecord::Base.shared_connection = ActiveRecord::Base.connection

puts "First Record cxn: #{FirstDatabase::Record.connection}"
# => First Record cxn: #
puts "AR Base cxn: #{ActiveRecord::Base.connection}"
# => AR Base cxn: #

As you can see, before I call the shared connection method, I have two different database connections. After, the shared connection method call, I have only one.

So any test that requires going to the second database connection to retrieve information will fail. :(

I'm going to post this problem and see if anyone has arrived at a solution.