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David and Jonathan are having trouble with testing namespaced controllers using RSpec. They have two controllers, Admin::MyController and SuperUser::MyController, and the RSpec tests appear to be finding the wrong controller.

Their short-term solution is to put a manual require in the spec that was getting confused.

UPDATE – The issue turns out to be a naming conflict. The app has a model named SuperUser, and the existence of this model can cause class loading to be confused for SuperUser::* controllers. In Socialitis, our standard is to use plural names for controller namespace names, to prevent this sort of confusion.

Interesting Things

Steve has learned that, in general, it’s a good idea to avoid using offsets when manipulating large quantities of data in MySQL. Luckily, some of MySQL’s quirks help with this:

• MySQL sorts indexes. The primary key is the main index that it sorts.
• Any select without an explicit order clause will pick an index, then return data in sorted order by that index. Again, usually you’ll see the primary key first.

• You can take advantage of this behavior to paginate through a large dataset where the order doesn’t really matter. The following statements perform better than your typical LIMIT/OFFSET clause:

  SELECT * FROM big_table WHERE id > 1 LIMIT 1000
  SELECT * FROM big_table WHERE id > 1000 LIMIT 1000
  SELECT * FROM big_table WHERE id > 2000 LIMIT 1000
  

• acts_as_solr uses this technique for reindexing.

• Also, inserting a record in the middle of an id ‘hole’ is not a very good idea in MySQL, because the database then puts a great deal of work into reordering all of the later records.

Here’s a link to a related blog post:
http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2007/4/6/faking-cursors-in-activerecord