Rails assertion logging

Robby Russell, who is working on a new book for O'Reilly press, posted a neat trick on logging from within your tests.

By adding this in addition to his logger method, I'm also able to log all the assertion messages to test.log when they fail - without any changes to my tests. I wouldn't usually care about logging in tests unless they fail, so that works even better for me.

#test_helper.rb:

class Test::Unit::TestCase

 # Robby's method
 def logger
   RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER
 end

end

# my addition
module Test
 module Unit
   module Assertions
     alias_method :assert_block_original, :assert_block
    
     def assert_block(message="assert_block failed.", 
                      &block)
       assert_block_original(message, &block)
     rescue AssertionFailedError => error
       logger.info(message.to_s)
       raise error
     end
   end
 end
end

I'm looking forward to Robby's book. Should be chock full of goodly nuggets. He's also presenting at Canada on Rails ("Sneaking Rails into the (Legacy) System"). As a guerilla Rubyist, I'm hoping for some new tricks from that too.