Functional Testing in Rails that Requires Login

For RESTful authentication, there is a
login_as(user) method in AuthenticatedTestHelper module that sets the
current user
in the session from the user fixtures. This is under the lib directory.

In my functional test, I have:

def test_should_show_billing_profile_for_valid_login
login_as (:aaron)
get :show, :id => :aaron.id
assert_response :success
assert_select "html:root>head>title", "BillingProfiles: show"
end

users.yml looks like this:

quentin:
id: 1
login: quentin
email: quentin@example.com
salt: 7e3041ebc2fc05a40c60028e2c4901a81035d3cd
crypted_password: 00742970dc9e6319f8019fd54864d3ea740f04b1 # test
created_at: <%= 5.days.ago.to_s :db %>
aaron:
id: 2
login: aaron
email: aaron@example.com
salt: 7e3041ebc2fc05a40c60028e2c4901a81035d3cd
crypted_password: 00742970dc9e6319f8019fd54864d3ea740f04b1 # test
created_at: <%= 1.days.ago.to_s :db %>


class BillingProfilesController < ApplicationController

before_filter :login_required

def show
@user = User.find(session[:user], :include => [:billing_profile])
@billing_profile = @user.billing_profile

respond_to do |format|
format.html # show.rhtml
format.xml { render :xml => @billing_profile.to_xml }
end
end

The problem was that I was using session[:user_id] in my controller
whereas the RESTful authentication
module is using session[:user] as shown below:

module AuthenticatedTestHelper
# Sets the current user in the session from the user fixtures.
def login_as(user)
@request.session[:user] = user ? users(user).id : nil
end
....

So I changed my controller code to use session[:user] and my tests now
pass! The plugin itself has the API to help you do the functional
testing. Very nice indeed.