Idle Hacking

I have for sometime had a feeling that functional and integration tests could be speed up even more by disabling the rendering of the layout within each test.

Here’s some sample code I used to remove layouts from all my integration and functional tests.

class ApplicationController

  # remove layout to improve test time
  def render_with_layout_disabled(*args)
    args << {:layout => false} # force layout to always be false
    render_without_layout_disabled(*args)
  end

  alias_method_chain :render, :layout_disabled
end

Tonight I’ve found that I get about 188% increase in integration test time and about 248% increase in functional test time by removing the layout.

Disabling the layout was pretty easy using alias_method_chain. My next question is does doing this break anything or make the test less meaningful? My thinking is no. Tests should be small in what they test. We can have a test to specifically test the layout of our application. Repeatedly testing the layout is redundant. So, making this change to my application for my tests seems like a good move.

Software Ruby on Rails