Reflect on Association

Integration tests should expose flaws in our Rails domain models and associations pretty well. Any remaining uncertainty can be remedied by familiarity with the methods (has_many, belongs_to), entity relationship diagrams, and good old trial and error.

But what if we want to explicitly check our associations in a unit test?

Here's one way, with reflect_on_association:

# app/models/hike.rb
class Hike < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :trips
end

# spec/models/hike_spec.rb
RSpec.describe Hike, type: :model do
  describe 'associations' do
    it 'has many trips' do
      ar = described_class.reflect_on_association(:trips)
      expect(ar.macro) == :has_many
    end
  end
end

Overkill? Probably. But it's nice to have.

Source code:

https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/activerecord/lib/active_record/reflection.rb#L109