Minitest Associations in Rails

I had some trouble after my last post on writing tests for my Narrations model. The guide I was using detailed how to test for associations from the has_many side, which would be for my Narrator model. I tried for quite some time testing from the Narration side like so:

test 'invalid without narrator reference' do
  assert_equal 1, @narrator.narrations.size
end

But I kept getting this error in terminal:

Error:
NarrationTest#test_invalid_without_narrator_reference:
ActiveRecord::Fixture::FixtureError: table "narrators" has no column named "narration".

My narrations.yml fixture looked like:

valid:
  title: How to Test Rails Models with Minitest
  published: true
  source_url: https://semaphoreci.com/community/tutorials/how-to-test-rails-models-with-minitest
  narrator: heidar

valid:
  title: Mocking in Ruby with MiniTest
  published: true
  source_url: https://semaphoreci.com/community/tutorials/mocking-in-ruby-with-minitest
  narrator: heidar

And my narrators.yml fixture looked like:

heidar:
  username: henrikbernhardsson
  first_name: Heidar
  last_name: Bernhardsson
  narration: valid

I thought that the two fixtures would know about each other this way. Basically I just needed to remove the test from my narration_test.rb and the narration: valid from my narrators.yml fixture. From the fixture standpoint, the foreign key of narrator_id lives in the narrations table, so I didn’t need to tell my Narrator fixture which Narrations it had; I only need to tell my Narration who its Narrator was, and the association test would only live in the narrator_test.rb test file. Here’s my Narrator test, and the Narrator fixture that worked:

test 'narrator has many narrations' do
  assert_equal 2, @narrator.narrations.size
end

heidar:
  username: henrikbernhardsson
  first_name: Heidar
  last_name: Bernhardsson
  # no need to reference the narration fixture

Running rails test gave me a very satisfying:

Running via Spring preloader in process 30957
Run options: --seed 397

# Running:

.........

Finished in 0.437782s, 20.5582 runs/s, 34.2636 assertions/s.
9 runs, 15 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

Next up let’s tackle the (conceptually) easy task of testing the view for the About page.