A monkey patch that fixes missing_method stack errors in rspec tests

gistfile1.txt

Hopefully this will be of some use to people supporting old rails versions.

I tried porting a rails 2.3 application that had been on ruby 1.8.7 to ruby 1.9.3.
After doing so I could not get my rspec 1.3 tests to run successfully (in my
controllers). I always got stack level too deep errors dealing with a NoMethodError.
I could see that an Array#flatten! call was the culprit.

I understood from this post
(http://yehudakatz.com/2010/01/02/the-craziest-fing-bug-ive-ever-seen/) that somewhere
in the Rails 1.9 development the way method_missing was handled was changed somewhat.
And that any code that overrode method_missing might conflict. I was using the
remarkable and remarkable_rails gems and they indeed were overriding method_missing.

To finally fix the problem I did a surgical monkey patch which I have listed below.
put this code in a file called test_patch.rb in my config/initializers directory.
Once in place my tests started passing.


if (RAILS_ENV == 'test')

  require 'spec'
  Spec::Example::ExampleGroupHierarchy.module_eval do

    def flatten!
      contents = flatten_contents self
      size.times do | i |
        delete_at(0)
      end
      contents.each do | thing |
        self << thing
      end
    end

    def flatten_contents nested_array
      result = []
      nested_array.each do | item |
        if item.kind_of?(Array)
          more_stuff = flatten_contents item
          more_stuff.each do | stuff |
            result << stuff
          end
        else
          result << item
        end
      end
      result
    end
  end

end