Authentication failing during functional tests

Question

I have a Ruby on Rails app that I'm working on and I'm having some problems with my functional tests. In particular, I keep getting denied access during my tests to pages that are possible to access in the browser when logged in through a user with similar credentials (same roles, etc.). For example, here's code from a test for a controller:

include Devise::TestHelpers
include Authorization::TestHelper
...
setup do
  @user = Factory(:user)
  @user.roles << Factory(:refinery_role)
  @user.roles << Factory(:agency_role)
  @user.save
  sign_in @user

  @agency = AgencyOrganization.create :name => "Test Agency"

  @adv1 = AdvertiserOrganization.create :name => "Test Advertiser", :parent => @agency

  UserOrganization.create :user_id => @user.id, :organization_id => @agency.id
end

test "agency user can edit advertiser" do
  assert @user.has_role? :agency #passes
  should_be_allowed_to :update, :advertiser_organizations #passes

  get :edit, {:id => @adv1.id}, {:agency_id => @agency.id}

  assert_equal "/unauthorized", request.env['PATH_INFO'] #passes :'(
  assert_template :edit #fails
  # and more tests we never get to
end

(Obviously those aren't all assertions I really want to check, but they demonstrate what's going on.)

For what it's worth, the above test fails with the follow exception raised:

4) Failure:
test_agency_user_can_edit_advertiser(AdvertiserOrganizationsControllerTest [/Users/gworley/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180@portal/gems/declarative_authorization-0.5.1/lib/declarative_authorization/maintenance.rb:170]:
Exception raised:
<#<Authorization::NotAuthorized: No matching rules found for update for #<Authorization::GuestUser:0x00000101cda2b0 @role_symbols=[:guest]> (roles [:guest], privileges [:update, :manage], context :advertiser_organizations).>>.

Again, as I said, everything works when you're actually running the app, it's just getting tests to work (although maybe the app is only working by accident, who knows?).

Answer 1

This is a shot in the dark because I'm not using Devise in my app, but the authentication system we use has this idiosyncrasy that it's just setting up the :user_id in the session, which gets clobbered by the session hash in the test.

I noticed your test method is setting :agency_id in the session.

Try removing the session hash entirely and seeing if the error you get is replaced by one about the absence of :agency_id rather than an authentication error, or else add whatever session variable that Devise uses for authentication to the hash.