Rails not rolling back transaction after failed save()

Question

I have this domain model: A user has group of items, and the state of the items can fail a validation.

Validation works fine, and I even see exceptions get called wh

Answer 1

It sounds like you're hitting a nested transaction problem in your tests.

I don't believe the Ruby driver for Postgres handles nested transactions, so you only get the scope of the outer transaction. If you have transactional fixtures enabled, there's an outer transaction wrapping your test execution. This means if your controller under test creates a second, inner transaction, and attempts to roll it back - you may not get the right behavior.

You can confirm the transaction interference by turning off the transactions in rspec:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.use_transactional_fixtures = false
end