Adding multiple database support to Cucumber

The Vqmetrics application needs to connect to two different databases. The first holds the videos, authors and their relevant statistics, while the second database holds the users, monitors and trackers.

We do this by specifying two databases in config/database.yml.

development:
  database: vqmetrics_devel
  < <: *login_dev_local

vqdata_development: &VQDATA_TEST
  database: vqdata_devel
  <<: *login_dev_local

So by default the vqmetrics_devel database will be used. When we need to specify a model where we need to connect to the vqdata_devel database we use

class Video < ActiveRecord::Base
  establish_connection "vqdata_#{RAILS_ENV}"
end

and for migrations that need to connect to this database we do the following.

class InitialSetup < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.connection
    Video.connection
  end
end

This setup works really well. However recently I moved this application to using Cucumber for testing. Tests worked fine the first time they are run but not the second time.

I discovered that the transaction on the second database where not being rolled back as they should be. Cucumber only sets up the first database for roll back by using

ActiveRecord::Base.connection

where it should be rolling them all back by looping through

ActiveRecord::Base.connection_handler.connection_pools.values.map {|pool| pool.connection}

I’ve filed a bug at lighthouseapp.