Active Sanity

Perform a sanity check on your database through active record validation.

Requirements

• ActiveSanity ~0.3 and ~0.4 requires Rails ~4.0
• ActiveSanity ~0.2 requires Rails ~3.1
• ActiveSanity ~0.1 requires Rails ~3.0

Install

Add the following line to your Gemfile

gem 'active_sanity'

If you wish to store invalid records in your database run:

$ rails generate active_sanity
$ rake db:migrate

Usage

Just run:

rake db:check_sanity

ActiveSanity will iterate over every records of all your models to check whether they're valid or not. It will save invalid records in the table invalid_records if it exists and output all invalid records.

The output might look like the following:

model       | id  | errors
User        |   1 | { "email" => ["is invalid"] }
Flight      | 123 | { "arrival_time" => ["can't be nil"], "departure_time" => ["is invalid"] }
Flight      | 323 | { "arrival_time" => ["can't be nil"] }

By default, the number of records fetched from the database for validation is set to 500. If this causes any issues in your domain/codebase, you can configure it this way in config\application.rb (or config\environments\test.rb):

class Application < Rails::Application
  config.after_initialize do
    ActiveSanity::Checker.batch_size = 439
  end
end

If you want to ignore certain models from being verified, you can create a file named active_sanity.ignore.yml at the root of your project with the following structure

models:
  - '<name of class to ignore>'
  - '<name of class to ignore>'

Contribute & Dev environment

Usual fork & pull request.

This gem is quite simple so I experiment using features only. To run the acceptance test suite, just run:

bundle install
RAILS_ENV=test cucumber features

Using features only was kinda handsome until I had to deal with two different database schema (with / without the table invalid_records) in the same test suite. I guess that the same complexity would arise using any other testing framework.