How can I get Sunspot to index the fixtures for my test environment?

Question

I have a rails app that uses Sunspot and Solr for search functionality. I'm currently writing functional tests (using Rails own test suite) to verify that when I call my searches controller with a search term in the params, the correct records are returned.

Currently I have:

test "should_return_some_records" do
  get :index, :term => "search term here"
  assert_response :success
  assert more stuff ...
end

When I run rake test:functionals, this test bombs with a "ActionView::Template::Error", as Sunspot has returned an empty results array from its search block.

If I run rake sunspot:reindex from within my setup method of my searches_controller_test, the test passes. However, this means that it action is also run for every test in that file, which makes things very slow.

Could someone give me a couple of pointers as to the best way to have Sunspot index my fixtures for my test environment, without having to do so before every single test.

Thanks muchly in advance.

James Hibbard James Hibbard · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-16T10:38:48

After much banging my head on the desk, I solved my problem like this (where Item is the model I am searching in) in my searches_controller_test.rb:

setup do
  Item.reindex
end

Don't know if this is the best way to do things, but maybe it'll help someone else.

How can I get Sunspot to index the fixtures for my test environment?

1 Answers