Douglas F Shearer

Sometimes you may want to check the user agent of a request in your Rails controller, be this for checking for spam, or only allowing services such as Feedburner to access your RSS feeds. Something like this:

def feed
  if request.user_agent !~"Feedburner"
    # redirect to feedburner
  else
    # display feed
  end
end

So what happens when you try to test this using the standard Rails functional tests? You should see an error something like the following:

ActionView::TemplateError: undefined method `user_agent' for
 #<ActionController::TestRequest:0xb69d9b88>

Not so good. The solution is to add the following module to your app. I chose to add it in the same file as the appropriate controller, after the end statement for the class:

module ActionController
  class TestRequest < AbstractRequest
    attr_accessor :user_agent
  end
end

Now your tests should run fine, and you can even set the user agent as you wish in your tests:

def test_access_allowed_to_feedburner
  @request.user_agent = 'Feedburner'
  get :feed
  assert_response :success
end

Hope this helps you out.