Ask for Help

A pivot asks: “Anyone know anything about data warehousing & ETL?”

A handful of pivots raise their hands.

Another pivot asks: “How about Radiant CMS?”

More pivots raise their hands.

Interesting things

• Should a before(:all) in Rspec raise an exception the return code coming back is 0. This breaks CI.

• Rspec supports before(:suite) — this runs, just once, before all other befores.

• In MongoMapper if you have a key (field) with type Hash, and set a default value, that default value points to a reference instantiated at class loading time. Instances inherit a reference to the same object (instead of a copy) which means any changes to to an instance with the default value propagate to all future instances using default. The immediate work-around is to wrap the value in a lambda, but within hours of reporting the bug there was a fix on HEAD.

• splunk users meetup here (at Pivotal Labs in SF) on Wednesday January 12th. More details on meetup.com.

• A global Rspec before(:each) defined in spec_helper.rb apparently does not have access to fixtures. One admittedly klunky workaround involves config.include a Module, and then a class_eval inside the included hook of the module. This has the unfortunate property that the before(:each) will run multiple times, once at every test level, instead of just once at the top level — though this can be fixed by looking at the length of ancestors in the included hook in the module and only doing the before(:each) if you are on the first level. Others argued that fixtures should be available in a before(:each) and that the problem is a load-order issue.